Cleopatra: A Life

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.

Mithradates correctly surmised that Egypt owed its continued autonomy more to mutual jealousies in Rome than to Auletes’ gold. Paradoxically, the country’s wealth prevented its annexation, a question first broached in Rome, by Julius Caesar, when Cleopatra was seven. Competing interests held the discussion in check. No one faction wished for any other to seize control of so fabulously rich a kingdom, the ideal base from which to overthrow a republic. For the Romans Cleopatra’s country remained a perennial nuisance, in the words of a modern historian “a loss if destroyed, a risk to annex, a problem to govern.”

From the start Auletes had engaged in a degrading dance with Rome, the indignities of which flavored his daughter’s early years. Throughout the Mediterranean, rulers looked to that city to shore up their dynastic claims; it was a haven for kings in trouble. A century earlier Ptolemy VI had traveled there in tatters, to set up house in a garret. Shortly thereafter his younger brother, Cleopatra’s great-grandfather, the dismemberer of his son, made the same trip. He displayed scars purportedly inflicted by Ptolemy VI and begged the Senate for mercy. The Romans looked wearily upon the endless procession of applicants, abused or not. They received their petitions and made few decisions. At one point the Senate went so far as to outlaw the hearing of their appeals. There was no reason to adopt a consistent foreign policy. As for the bewildering question of Egypt, some felt that that country would be best transformed into a housing project for Rome’s poor.

More recently and more problematically, another of Cleopatra’s great-uncles had devised an ingenious strategy to protect himself from his conspiring brother. In the event of his demise, Ptolemy X willed his kingdom to Rome. That testament hung awkwardly over Auletes’ head, as did his own illegitimacy, as did his unpopularity with the Alexandrian Greeks. And as his hold on the throne was insecure, he had little choice but to curry favor on the other side of the Mediterranean. That cost him in Roman eyes, where he appeared to be pandering, again in the eyes of his subjects, who did not like their sovereign bowing at foreign feet. Auletes moreover subscribed to the wisdom promulgated by the father of Alexander the Great: any fortress could be stormed, provided there was a way up for a donkey with a load of gold on its back. He consequently found himself trapped in a vicious circle. The donkey loads required Cleopatra’s father to tax his subjects more severely, which infuriated the very people whose loyalty he labored so assiduously to buy in Rome.

Auletes knew only too well what Caesar was in 48 discovering firsthand: the Alexandrian populace constituted a force unto itself. The best thing you could say of that people was that they were sharp-witted. Their humor was quick and biting. They knew how to laugh. They were mad for drama, as the city’s four hundred theaters suggested. They were no less sharp-elbowed. The genius for entertainment extended to a taste for intrigue, a propensity to riot. To one visitor Alexandrian life was “just one continuous revel, not a sweet or gentle revel either, but savage and harsh, a revel of dancers, whistlers, and murderers all combined.” Cleopatra’s subjects had no compunction about massing at the palace gates and loudly howling their demands. Very little was required to set off an explosion. For two centuries they had freely and wildly deposed, exiled, and assassinated Ptolemies. They had forced Cleopatra’s great-grandmother to rule with one son when she attempted to rule with the other. They had driven out Cleopatra’s great-uncle. They had dragged Ptolemy XI from the palace and torn him limb from limb after he had murdered his wife. To the Roman mind, the Egyptian army was no better. As Caesar noted from the palace, “These men habitually demanded that friends of the king be put to death, plundered the property of the rich, laid siege to the king’s residence to win higher pay, and removed some and appointed others to the throne.” Such were the seething forces that Caesar and Cleopatra could hear outside the palace walls. She knew they harbored no particular affection for her. Their feelings about Romans were equally clear. When Cleopatra was nine or ten, a visiting official had accidentally killed a cat, an animal held sacred in Egypt.^* A furious mob assembled, with whom Auletes’ representative attempted to reason. While this was a crime for an Egyptian, surely a foreigner merited a special exemption? He could not save the visitor from the bloodthirsty crowd.

What Auletes passed down to his daughter was a precarious balancing act. To please one constituency was to displease another. Failure to comply with Rome would lead to intervention. Failure to stand up to Rome would lead to riots. (Auletes appears not to have been much loved by anyone save Cleopatra, who remained loyal always to his memory, despite the political cost of that loyalty at home.) The dangers were manifold. You could be removed by Rome, as Cleopatra’s uncle, the king of Cyprus, had been. You could be eliminated—stabbed, poisoned, exiled, dismembered—by your own family. Or you could be deposed by the disaffected, disruptive populace. (There were variations on those themes as well. A Ptolemy could be hated by his people, adored by the royal courtiers; loved by the people and betrayed by his family; or detested by the Alexandrian Greeks and loved by the native Egyptians, as was Cleopatra.) Auletes would spend twenty years currying favor in Rome only to discover that he should have been ingratiating himself at home. When he chose not to intervene in Cyprus he was besieged by his subjects, who demanded he either stand up to the Romans or bail out his brother. Panic ensued. Was this not a cautionary tale for Egypt? Auletes fled to Rome, where he spent much of the next three years negotiating for his restoration. It was to those years that Cleopatra owed Caesar’s present visit. While Auletes was by no means universally welcomed in Rome, few—Caesar and Pompey among them—were able to resist a Greek bearing bribes. Many were happy to lend Auletes the money with which to pay those bribes, funds he eagerly accepted. The more numerous his creditors, the more numerous those invested in his restoration.

For much of 57 the hot potato business of the day was how, if at all, to handle the deposed king’s appeals. The great orator Cicero furtively worked overtime to walk friends through the thorny matter, a business “bedeviled by certain individuals, not without the connivance of the king himself and his advisers.” The question stood at a deadlock for some time. Auletes may have gone down in history as a profligate and a puppet, but in Rome he distinguished himself for tenacity and masterly negotiation, to the dismay of his hosts. He papered the Forum and Senate with flyers. He handed out litters—canopied couches, in which to travel splendidly through the city—to his supporters. The situation was complicated by the rivalries among politicians who vied for the luscious reward of helping him; his restoration amounted to a get-rich-quick scheme. By January 56, Cicero complained that the business had “gained a highly invidious notoriety.” It occasioned shouting, shoving, spitting, in the Senate. And the matter only grew more delicate. To prevent Pompey or any other individual from assisting Auletes, a religious oracle surfaced. It warned that the Egyptian king was not to be restored by a Roman army, an act expressly forbidden by the gods. The Senate respected this subterfuge, groaned Cicero, “not for religion’s sake, but out of ill will and the odium aroused by the royal largesse.”

From Auletes’ overseas adventure came another essential lesson for the adolescent Cleopatra. No sooner had Auletes left the country than the eldest of his children, Berenice IV, seized the throne; his stock was so low that the Alexandrians were delighted to exchange him for a teenaged girl. Berenice enjoyed the support of the native population but suffered from the consort problem, one that would speak to Cleopatra’s predicament and that she would address differently. Berenice needed a marriageable co-regent. This was a difficult order, as appropriate, well-born Macedonian Greeks were in short supply. (For some reason it was decided that Berenice should pass over her younger brothers, who would have qualified as kings.) The people chose for her, summoning a Seleucid prince. Berenice found him repellent. He was strangled within days of the union. The next prospect was an ambitious Pontic priest who boasted the only two credentials that mattered: he was hostile to Rome, and he could pass for noble. Installed as co-regent in the spring of 56, he fared better. Meanwhile the Alexandrians had dispatched a delegation of one hundred ambassadors to Rome, to protest Auletes’ brutality and prevent his return. He poisoned the group’s leader and had the rest assassinated, bribed, or run out of town before they could make their case. Conveniently, no investigation of the massacre—in which Pompey appeared to have been complicit—followed, another tribute to Auletes’ generosity.

Roman legions returned Auletes to Egypt in 55. None of them was much enchanted by the dubious assignment, especially as it involved a march through a searing desert, followed by a slog through the quicksand and fetid lagoons of Pelusium. Aulus Gabinius, the Syrian governor and a Pompey protégé, reluctantly consented to lead the mission, either for legitimate reasons (he feared a government headed by Berenice’s new husband); for a bribe nearly equivalent to Egypt’s annual income; or at the urging of the eager young head of his cavalry, much in Auletes’ thrall. That officer was the shaggy-haired Mark Antony, who was to leave behind a great name on which to capitalize later. He fought valiantly. He also urged Auletes to pardon the disloyal army at the Egyptian frontier. Again sounding a little like an ineffectual dilettante, the king “in his rage and spite” preferred to execute those men. For his part Gabinius meticulously respected the oracle. He arranged for Auletes to follow safely behind the actual battles so that he could not literally be said to have been restored by an army. The Egyptian king was nonetheless returned to the palace by the first Roman legions to set foot in Alexandria.

Of the reunion with his family we have only a partial account. Auletes executed Berenice. He retaliated at court as well, where he thinned the ranks, confiscating fortunes along the way. He replaced high officials and reorganized the army that had opposed him. At the same time he settled lands and pensions on the troops Gabinius left behind. They transferred their allegiance to Egypt. It was that compelling donkey load again; it paid better to serve a Ptolemaic king than a Roman general. As Caesar later observed, those soldiers became “habituated to the ill-disciplined ways of Alexandrian life and had unlearnt the good name and orderly conduct of Romans.” They did so in stunningly short order. In his final moments Pompey had recognized a Roman veteran among his murderers.

Auletes’ reunion with his second daughter was presumably of a different flavor. In light of her sister’s overreaching, thirteen-year-old Cleopatra was now first in line to the throne. Already she had absorbed a great deal in addition to the training in declamation, rhetoric, and philosophy. Her political education could be said to have been completed in 56; she would draw heavily on this chapter a decade later. To be pharaoh was good. To be a friend and ally of Rome was better. The question was not how to resist that power, like Mithradates, who had made a career of goading, defying, and massacring Romans, but how best to manipulate it. Fortunately, Roman politics were highly personal, due to a clash of senatorial ambitions. With shrewdness it was fairly easy to pit the key players against one another. To an early education in pageantry Cleopatra added a first-class introduction to intrigue. She had been in the palace while Egyptian forces girded against her father on his return. By 48, she was working from a playbook Auletes had handed down to her earlier, and for the second time from a palace under siege. Her alliance with Caesar was a direct descendant of her father’s with Pompey, the greatest difference being that she accomplished in a matter of days what took her father more than two decades.

Five years after the return, Auletes died, of natural causes. He was in his midsixties and had had ample time to prepare his succession. It is possible that, as his eldest surviving daughter, Cleopatra served briefly as his co-regent in his final months, certain that—unlike so many of her ancestors, including Auletes himself—she was actively groomed for the throne. Auletes departed from tradition in leaving the throne to two siblings, which would seem to indicate either that Cleopatra manifested exceptional promise at an early age, that Auletes felt he was heading off a power struggle by appointing the two jointly, or that he believed Cleopatra and Ptolemy XIII inseparable, hardly the case. Most likely father and daughter were particularly close. She went out of her way to acknowledge him, appending “father-loving” to her title and preserving it there, despite a change of consort. One of her first acts would have been to see to the funeral arrangements for her father, a protracted, incense- and unguent-heavy affair, punctuated by offerings, and loud with ritual laments. At eighteen she stepped briskly and vigorously into the role of queen.

Almost immediately she had the chance to embrace the wisdom of her father, who on arrival in Egypt had made a point of paying tribute to the native gods, in small villages and at cult centers. To do so was to secure the devotion of the Egyptian population. They revered their pharaoh as thoroughly as the unruly Alexandrians tested him. A smart Ptolemy dedicated temples to Egyptian gods and underwrote their cult; Cleopatra needed the support, and the manpower, of the indigenous population. Well before her coronation the Buchis bull had died. One of several sacred bulls, he was closely associated with the sun and war gods; his cult thrived near Thebes, in Upper Egypt. Roundly worshipped, the bull traveled by special barge in the company of his dedicated staff. He appeared at public events in gold and lapis. In the open air he was fitted with a net over his face, so as not to be pestered by flies. He lived about twenty years, after which he was replaced by a carefully chosen successor, who bore the singular markings—a white body and a black face—of a sacred animal. Within weeks of Auletes’ death, Cleopatra seized the opportunity to shore up a core constituency. In full ceremonial dress she appears to have sailed with the royal fleet six hundred miles upriver toward Thebes, to lead an elaborate, floating procession. All the priests of Egypt converged for that momentous occasion, held during the full moon. Amid a crush of pilgrims, “the Queen, the Lady of the two Lands, the goddess who loves her father,” rowed the new bull to his installation on the west bank of the Nile, a strong and unusual vote in support of the native Egyptians. Within the temple sanctuary, amid a throng of officials and white-robed priests, Cleopatra three days later presided over the bull’s inauguration. The area was familiar and well disposed to her. As a fugitive in 49, she would take refuge there.

Several times in the early years of her reign she inserted herself into the native cult. She offered assistance as well with the burial of the most important of the sacred bulls, that of Memphis. She contributed to his cult expenses, which were high, and provided generous rations of wine, beans, bread, and oil for his officials. There is no question that the pageantry—and the unusual appearance of a Ptolemy—worked an effect: as she made her regal way up the sphinx-lined causeway to the richly painted temple in 51, Cleopatra “was seen by all.” We have the description from a line of hieroglyphics, a ceremonial language with a distinct political purpose, perhaps best described as “boasting made permanent.” There is evidence in Cleopatra’s first year of her ambition as well. Her brother’s name is absent from official documents, where he should have figured as Cleopatra’s superior. Nor is he in evidence on her coins; Cleopatra’s commanding portrait appears alone. Coinage qualifies as a kind of language, too. It is the only one in which she speaks to us in her own voice, without Roman interpreters. This was how she presented herself to her subjects.

She was less adept at assimilating the lesson of Berenice. Pothinus, Achillas, and Theodotus took poorly to this independent-minded upstart, so intent on ruling alone. They had a formidable ally in the Nile, which refused to cooperate with the new queen. The country’s well-being depended entirely on the height of the flood; drought compromised the food supply and the social order. The flood of 51 was poor, that of the following summer little better. Priests complained of shortages that prevented them from performing rituals. Towns emptied as hungry villagers poured into Alexandria. Thieves roamed the land. Prices increased dramatically; the distress was universal. By October 50, when it became clear that drastic measures were in order, Cleopatra’s brother was back on the scene. At the end of that month the royal couple jointly issued an emergency decree. They rerouted wheat and dried vegetables from the countryside north. Hungry Alexandrians were more dangerous than hungry villagers; it was in everyone’s best interest to appease them. The edict was to be reinforced in the time-honored way: Offenders received a death sentence. Denunciations were encouraged, informants richly rewarded. (A free man received a third of the guilty party’s property. A slave obtained a sixth, along with his freedom.) At the same time, Ptolemy XIII and Cleopatra offered incentives to those who remained behind to cultivate the land. Either some oppressing or some coercing took place in those months at the palace as well. The two siblings may have been working in tandem for the good of the country. Or Ptolemy may have been undermining his sister, starving her constituents for the sake of his. Both siblings issued the emergency edict. Cleopatra’s name appears second.

Already on treacherous ground, she twice over the next year fell into the trap that had swallowed her father. At the end of June 50, two sons of the Roman governor of Syria arrived in Alexandria, to coax the troops who had restored Auletes to return to the fold. They were needed elsewhere. Those soldiers had no interest in leaving Egypt, where Auletes had amply rewarded them for their service, and where many had started families. They emphatically declined the invitation, by murdering the governor’s sons. Cleopatra might have meted out justice herself but opted instead to secure Rome’s goodwill with a theatrical flourish: she sent the murderers to Syria in chains, a move she should have known would cost her the support of the army. And she continued to trade one vulnerability for another. Roman requests for military assistance were as common in Alexandria as were requests for dynastic interventions in Rome. They were not universally granted, although Auletes had initially won Pompey’s favor by providing him with troops. In 49 Pompey’s son made a similar request of Cleopatra, applying for assistance in his father’s campaign against Caesar. Cleopatra faithfully offered up grain, soldiers, and a fleet, all at a time of dire agricultural distress. This was most likely her Cyprus. Within months her name disappears from all documentation, and she had fled for her life, to wind up camped in the Syrian desert with her band of mercenaries.

SHORTLY AFTER CLEOPATRA’S October 48 arrival, Caesar moved from the villa on the royal grounds to the palace proper. Each generation of Ptolemies had added to that sprawling complex, as magnificent in its design as in its materials. “Pharaoh” means “the greatest household” in ancient Egyptian, and on this the Ptolemies had delivered. The palace included well over a hundred guest rooms. Caesar looked out at lush grounds dotted with fountains and statuary and guesthouses; a vaulted walkway led from the palace complex to its theater, which stood on higher terrain. No Hellenistic monarchs did opulence better than the Ptolemies, the preeminent importers of Persian carpets, of ivory and gold, tortoiseshell and panther skin. As a general rule any surface that could be ornamented was—with garnet and topaz, with encaustic, with brilliant mosaic, with gold. The coffered ceilings were studded with agate and lapis, the cedar doors with mother-of-pearl, the gates overlaid with gold and silver. Corinthian capitals shimmered with ivory and gold. Cleopatra’s palace boasted the greatest profusion of precious materials known at the time.

Insofar as it was possible to be comfortable while under siege, Cleopatra and Caesar were well accommodated. None of the extravagant tableware or plush furnishings of their redoubt detracted, however, from the fact that Cleopatra—virtually alone in the city—was eager for a Roman to involve himself in Egyptian affairs. The rumbles and jeers outside, the scuffling in the street, the whizzing stones, drove that point home. The most intense fighting took place in the harbor, which the Alexandrians attempted to blockade. Early on they managed to set fire to several Roman freighters. The fleet Cleopatra had lent Pompey had moreover returned. Both sides jockeyed for control of those fifty quadriremes and quinqueremes, large vessels requiring four and five banks of rowers. Caesar could not afford to allow the ships to fall into enemy hands if he expected to see either provisions or reinforcements, for which he had sent out calls in every direction. Nor could he hope to man them. He was seriously outnumbered and at a geographic disadvantage; in desperation, he set fire to the anchored warships. Cleopatra’s reaction as flames spread over the ropes and across the decks is difficult to imagine. She could not have escaped the penetrating clouds of smoke, sharp with the tang of resin, that wafted across her gardens; the palace was illuminated by the blaze, which burned well into the night. This was the dockyard fire that may have claimed some portion of the Alexandrian library. Nor could Cleopatra have missed the pitched battle that preceded the conflagration, for which the entire city turned out: “And there was not a soul in Alexandria, whether Roman or townsman, except for those whose attention was engrossed in fortification work or fighting, who did not make for the highest buildings and take their place to see the show from any vantage point, and with prayers and vows demand victory for their own side from the immortal gods.” Amid mingled shouts and much commotion, Caesar’s men scrambled on to Pharos to seize the great lighthouse. Caesar allowed them a bit of plunder, then stationed a garrison on the rocky island.

Also shortly after Cleopatra’s arrival, Caesar composed the final pages of the volume we know today as The Civil War. About those events he would have been writing in something close to real time. It has been suggested that he broke off where he did—with Arsinoe’s defection and Pothinus’s murder—for literary or political reasons. Caesar could not easily discourse on a Western republic in an Eastern palace. He was also at that juncture in his narrative briefly in possession of the upper hand. Just as likely Caesar found himself with less time to write, if not overwhelmed. He was indeed the man who famously dictated letters from his stadium seat, who turned out a text on Latin while traveling from Gaul, a long poem en route to Spain. The murder of the eunuch Pothinus had galvanized the opposition, however. Already it included the women and children of the city. They had no need of wicker screens or battering rams, happy as they were to express themselves with slingshots and stones. Sprays of homemade missiles pelted the palace walls. Battles flared night and day, as Alexandria filled with zealous reinforcements and with siege huts and catapults of various sizes. Triple-width, forty-foot stone barricades went up across the city, transformed into an armed camp.

From the palace Caesar observed what had put Alexandria on the map and what made it so difficult to rule: its people were endlessly, boundlessly resourceful. His men watched in amazement—and with resentment; ingenuity was meant to be a Roman specialty—as the Alexandrians constructed wheeled, ten-story assault towers. Draft animals led those mammoth contraptions down the straight, paved avenues of the city. Two things in particular astonished the Romans. Everything could be accomplished more quickly in Alexandria. And its people were clever copyists of the first rank. Repeatedly they went Caesar one better. As a Roman general recounted later, they “put into effect whatever they saw us do with such skill that it seemed our troops had imitated their work.” National pride was at stake on both sides. When Caesar bested the seafaring Alexandrians in a naval battle, they were shattered. Subsequently they threw themselves into the task of building a fleet. In the secret royal dockyard sat a number of old ships, no longer seaworthy. Down came colonnades and the roofs of gymnasiums, their rafters magically transformed into oars. In a matter of days, twenty-two quadriremes and five quinqueremes materialized, along with a number of smaller craft, manned and ready for combat. Nearly overnight, the Egyptians conjured up a navy twice as large as Caesar’s.^*

Repeatedly the Romans sputtered about the twin Alexandrian capacities for deceit and treachery, which in the midst of an armed conflict surely counts as high praise. As if to prove the point, Ganymedes, Arsinoe’s ex-tutor and the new royal commander, set his men to work digging deep wells. They drained the city’s underground conduits, into which they pumped seawater. Quickly the palace water proved cloudy and undrinkable. (Ganymedes may or may not have known this to be an old trick of Caesar’s, who had similarly annoyed Pompey.) The Romans panicked. Did it not make more sense to retreat immediately? Caesar calmed his men: Fresh water could not be far off, as veins of it reliably occurred near oceans. One lay just beyond the palace walls. As for withdrawal, it was not an option. The legionnaires could not reach their ships without the Alexandrians slaughtering them. Caesar ordered an all-night dig, which proved him correct; his men quickly located fresh water. It remained true, however, that on their side the Alexandrians had great cleverness and plentiful resources, as well as that most potent of motivations: their autonomy was at stake. They had distinctly unfavorable memories of Gabinius, the general who had returned Auletes to the throne. To fail to drive Caesar out now was to become a province of Rome. Caesar could only remind his men they must fight with equal conviction.

He found himself entirely on the defensive, perhaps another reason the account of the Alexandrian War that bears his name was written by a senior officer, based on postwar conversations. Caesar indeed controlled the palace and the lighthouse in the east, but Achillas, Ptolemy’s commander, dominated the rest of the city, and with it nearly every advantageous position. His men persistently ambushed Roman supplies. Fortunately for Caesar, if there was one thing he could count on as much as Alexandrian ingenuity it was Alexandrian infighting. Arsinoe’s tutor argued with Achillas, whom he accused of treachery. Plot followed counterplot, much to the delight of the army, bribed generously and in turn more generously by each side. Ultimately Arsinoe convinced her tutor to murder the redoubtable Achillas. Cleopatra knew well what their sister Berenice had accomplished in their father’s absence; she had badly blundered in failing to prevent Arsinoe’s escape.

Arsinoe and Ganymedes turned out to be no favorites of the people, however. This the Alexandrians made clear as reinforcements approached and as Caesar—despite a forced swim in the harbor and a devastating loss of men—began to feel the war turning in his favor. To the palace came a delegation in mid-January, shortly after Cleopatra’s twenty-second birthday. They lobbied for young Ptolemy’s release. Already the people had tried unsuccessfully to liberate their king. Now they claimed they were finished with his sister. They yearned for peace. They needed Ptolemy “in order, as they claimed, that they might consult with him about the terms on which a truce could be effected.” He had clearly behaved well while under guard. Generally he left no impression of fortitude or leadership, though petulance came naturally to him. Caesar saw some advantages in his release. Were the Alexandrians to surrender, he would need somehow to dispense with this extraneous king; Ptolemy could clearly never again rule with his sister. In his absence Caesar would have better reason to deliver up the Alexandrians to Cleopatra. And were Ptolemy to continue to fight—it is unclear if the rationale here was Caesar’s, or attributed to him later—the Romans would be conducting a war that was all the more honorable for being waged “against a king rather than against a gang of refugees and runaway slaves.”

Caesar duly sat Cleopatra’s thirteen-year-old brother down for a talk. He urged him “to think of his ancestral kingdom, to take pity on his glorious homeland, which had been disfigured by the disgrace of fire and ruin; to begin by bringing his people back to their senses, and then save them; and to trust the Roman people and himself, Caesar, whose faith in him was firm enough to send him to join enemies who were under arms.” Caesar then dismissed the young man. Ptolemy made no move to leave; instead he again dissolved into tears. He begged Caesar not to send him away. Their friendship meant more to him even than his throne. His devotion moved Caesar who—eyes welling up in turn—assured him that they would be reunited soon enough. At which young Ptolemy set off to embrace the war with a new intensity, one that confirmed that “the tears he had shed when talking to Caesar were obviously tears of joy.” Only Caesar’s men seemed gratified by this turn of events, which they hoped might cure their commander of his absurdly forgiving ways. The comedy would not have surprised Cleopatra, well accomplished in the dramatic arts, and possibly even the mastermind behind this scene. It is conceivable that Caesar liberated Ptolemy to sow further dissension in the rebel ranks. If he did so (the interpretation is a generous one), Cleopatra presumably collaborated on the staging.

Fortunately for Caesar and Cleopatra, a large army of reinforcements hurried toward Alexandria. The best help came from a high-ranking Judaean official, who arrived with a contingent of three thousand well-armed Jews. Ptolemy set out to crush that force at nearly the same moment that Caesar set out to join it; he was for some time frustrated by the Egyptian cavalry. All converged in a fierce battle west of the Nile, at a location halfway between Alexandria and present-day Cairo. The casualties were great on both sides, but—by storming the high point of the Egyptian camp in a surprise early-morning maneuver—Caesar managed a swift victory. Terrified, a great number of the Egyptians hurled themselves from the ramparts of their fort into the surrounding trenches. Some survived. It seemed Ptolemy did not; he was probably little mourned by anyone, including his advisers. As his body never materialized, Caesar took special pains to display his golden armor, which did. The magical, rejuvenating powers of the Nile were well known; already it had delivered up queens in sacks and babies in baskets. Caesar did not want a resurrection on his hands, though even his meticulous efforts now would not prevent the appearance of a Ptolemy-pretender later.

With his cavalry Caesar hurried to Alexandria, to receive the kind of welcome he had doubtless expected months earlier: “The entire population of the town threw down their weapons, left their defenses, assumed the garb in which suppliants commonly crave pardon from their masters, and after bringing out all the sacred objects with whose religious awe they used to appeal to their displeased or angry monarchs, went to meet Caesar as he approached, and surrendered to him.” Graciously he accepted the surrender and consoled the populace. Cleopatra would have been ecstatic; Caesar’s defeat would have been hers as well. She presumably received advance word but would in any event have heard the raucous cheers as Caesar approached on horseback. His legions met him at the palace with loud applause. It was March 27; the relief must have been extreme. Caesar’s men had given him more than a decade of service, and on arrival in Alexandria believed the civil war to be over. They had by no means counted on this last, little understood exploit. Nor were they alone in their consternation. Rome had heard nothing from Caesar since December. What was keeping him in Egypt, when all was off-kilter at home? Whatever the reason for the delay, the silence was unsettling. It must have begun to seem that Egypt had claimed Caesar as it had Pompey and—as some would argue—in an entirely different way, it ultimately would.

Why did he stay? There is no convincing political explanation for the interlude, an illogical adventure in the life of a supremely logical man. It remains baffling that the greatest soldier since Alexander, “a prodigy of activity and foresight” on every other occasion, should have been blindsided and sandbagged in Africa. The best that can be said of the Alexandrian War is that Caesar acquitted himself brilliantly in a situation in which he stupidly found himself. For an explanation he cited the northerly winds, “which blew absolutely directly against anyone sailing out of Alexandria.” Indeed they would have, though a sentence earlier Caesar acknowledges having sent to Asia for reinforcements, the reinforcements that would ultimately save the day. That mission would have involved an outbound trip. And within weeks the winds were strongly in his favor. Caesar did not back down; even with a depleted, demoralized army, he was not one to turn from danger. He makes no reference himself to Auletes’ great debt, a cause for landing if not for remaining. As so often happens, the question comes down to love or money. It is not easy to argue against the former.

In the first place we have Caesar’s resounding silence. We leave all kinds of things out of our memoirs and Caesar (and his ghostwriter) omitted a great many, not least of all his personality. Caesar wrote of himself with a stern, clinical detachment and in the third person; his style is so limpid and dispassionate as to appear incontestably true. Which it may well be, though in his account he neither crosses the Rubicon nor sets fire to the Alexandrian library. It is entirely possible that the latter charge was overstated. The dockyard warehouses may alone have gone up in flames, which would have destroyed only grain supplies and a modest number of texts.^* Similarly, one of the few places Cleopatra fails to make a dramatic entrance is in Caesar’s Civil War, where her charms are supplanted by the seasonal winds. For a married man who had been pilloried once for his stay in an Eastern court, for a military genius who made a gross blunder at the side of a queen if not on her behalf, this was not a matter that invited elaboration. In the continuation of Caesar’s narrative, Cleopatra appears precisely once. At war’s end he bestows the throne of Egypt upon her, because she “had remained loyal to him, and stayed within his lines.” Cleopatra goes down in Caesar’s history for one reason alone: she was good and obedient.

Certainly the suspicion that there was more to the matter than unfavorable winds and obedient females was in the air. In Rome Cicero lost no time in casting shameful aspersions. Just after Caesar’s death, Mark Antony—a curious messenger for this particular message—would protest that Caesar had not tarried in Alexandria “out of voluptuousness.” A century later, Plutarch begged to differ: “As to the war in Egypt, some say it was at once dangerous and dishonorable, and noways necessary, but occasioned only by his passion for Cleopatra.” (The inconvenient oracle of Auletes’ day—prohibiting the restoration of an Egyptian monarch by a Roman army—appears to have been quickly forgotten.) You could argue that Caesar had no particular affection for Cleopatra, that the two only happened to find themselves on the same side of a baffling war, but it would be easier to argue that she had no affection for him. She contributed nothing to that enterprise. Caesar would have been well served by throwing her over, if only to obtain a temporary truce. He would have been within his rights at war’s end to annex Egypt; Cleopatra must have been very, very persuasive. Pothinus had balked at repaying the Egyptian debt. Clearly Cleopatra did not. It is difficult to escape the conclusion that Caesar was to some extent in her sway. Dio thought that obvious: Caesar handed Egypt to Cleopatra, “for whose sake he had waged the conflict.” He acknowledges a certain embarrassment. At war’s end Caesar put Cleopatra on the throne with her remaining brother to defuse Roman anger that he was himself sleeping with her. To Dio this was “a mere pretence, which she accepted, whereas in truth she ruled alone and spent her time in Caesar’s company.” The two were inseparable. Plutarch felt similarly but expressed himself more subtly. Reading between his lines, he plainly believed Caesar both preoccupied with military matters and in Cleopatra’s bed every night. There is as well the minor matter of the departure date. The Alexandrian War ended on March 27. Caesar stayed with Cleopatra until mid-June.

THERE WAS REASON to celebrate, all the more so after having been cooped up behind a thicket of barricades for the better part of six months. And as every visitor to Hellenistic Egypt had noted, eyes wide, belly bursting, travel bag groaning, the Ptolemies knew how to entertain. Save that written by a poet who demonized Caesar and had less affection for Cleopatra, we have no account of her actual postwar banquets. We do know what a Ptolemaic feast looked like. Self-restraint was not an Alexandrian specialty, and in the spring of 47 Cleopatra had no cause to embrace it. She had secured the greatest of prizes, for “in view of Caesar’s favor there was nothing that she could not do.” He had gone further out on a limb than had any other Roman for an Egyptian sovereign. Ptolemy XIII, Pothinus, and Achillas were all dead. Theodotus was in exile, Arsinoe in Roman custody. Caesar had effectively eliminated every one of Cleopatra’s rivals to the throne. She reigned supreme, more securely than she had done four years previously, more securely than had any Ptolemy in several generations. She prided herself on her hospitality and knew her guest did as well; Caesar had once thrown his baker into chains for having served substandard bread. He was himself responsible for a fair amount of entertainment inflation. The queen of Egypt had every political reason to impress and please him; personal rapport aside, there would have been a heady admixture of pride, relief, and gratitude. And she had the resources to impress. The Alexandrian War gave Cleopatra everything she wanted. It cost her little.

Even in her exile, a swarm of servants had hovered around Cleopatra, ministering to her comforts. In the spring of 47 that swarm increased to a horde, with the return or appointment of tasters, scribes, lamplighters, royal harpists, masseurs, pages, doorkeepers, notaries, silver stewards, oil keepers, pearl setters. At her side also was a new consort. To satisfy the people’s preference for a ruling couple, possibly as well to cover Caesar’s tracks, twelve-year-old Ptolemy XIV ascended to the throne. The marriage took place soon after the Alexandrian surrender. We do not know how it was celebrated. From Cleopatra’s perspective, one nonentity replaced another. Ptolemy XIV assumed the same title that had been used by his dead brother; he never appeared with his sister on her coins. If he had ambitions or opinions of his own he knew better than to express them now. Surely he had no say in the administration that his sister-wife set about reconstituting. Whether or not Caesar had considered annexing Egypt he had clearly discovered that Cleopatra was in many respects similar to her country: a shame to lose, a risk to conquer, a headache to govern. Some courtiers had remained faithful; among Cleopatra’s entourage figured several of her father’s advisers. Those who had not did their best quickly to reassess their conduct. So presumably did the Greek aristocracy, which had presented Cleopatra with her strongest opposition.

She had at court a serious handicap, one that Caesar would have done well to observe. As a later Roman leader noted: “For the ruler labors under this special disadvantage as regards his friends, that although he can protect himself from his enemies by arranging his friends against them, there is no corresponding ally on whom he may rely to protect him from these friends.” For the most part Cleopatra knew who the ill-wishers were. Matters were murkier concerning her courtiers. She had after all been holed up for months with a Roman, battling a people who wanted no Roman in the house and who had deposed her father for consorting with them. The rules had now changed. There was always a certain amount of rot at court; the war would have been an excuse to clean it out. Those who had opposed Cleopatra paid a heavy price. Those rumored to have done so doubtless paid too. She replaced high officials and eliminated others, confiscating fortunes in the process. There were poisonings and stabbings, not dissimilar from those in which Auletes had engaged upon his restoration. The army alone invited a bloody round of proscriptions. It was by no means a smooth transition.

Around the palace and harbor there was more prosaic work to be done: trenches to be filled, palisades to be dismantled, debris to be cleared, structural damage to be repaired. What emerged was and remained “the first city of the civilized world, certainly far ahead of all the rest in elegance and extent and riches and luxury,” as a contemporary traveler put it. Visitors were at a loss to decide if Alexandria’s size or beauty was the more imposing. That was before acknowledging its hyperkinetic population. “Looking at the city, I doubted whether any race of men could ever fill it; looking at the inhabitants, I wondered whether any city could ever be found large enough to hold them all. The balance seemed exactly even,” effused a native son. Alexandria was studded with an awe-inspiring collection of sculpture, much of it carved of pink or red granite and violet porphyry, all of it pulsing with robust color. To anyone who knew Athens, the Egyptian city felt familiar, crowded as it was with fine Ptolemaic copies of Greek pieces. It was neither the first nor the last place in the world where a decline in power translated into an enormity of symbols; as the Ptolemaic influence diminished, the statuary ballooned, to hyperbolic dimensions. Forty-foot-tall rose granite sculptures of Cleopatra II and Cleopatra III greeted new arrivals in the Alexandrian harbor. At least one colossal hawk-headed sphinx towered over the palace wall. Glossy thirty-foot-long sphinxes guarded the city’s temples.

Alexandria’s ninety-foot-wide main avenue left visitors speechless, its scale unmatched in the ancient world. You could lose a day exploring it from end to end. Lined with delicately carved columns, silk awnings, and richly painted facades, the Canopic Way could accommodate eight chariots driving abreast. The city’s primary side streets too were nearly twenty feet wide, paved with stones, expertly drained, and partially lit at night. From its central crossroads—a ten-minute walk from the palace—a forest of sparkling limestone colonnades extended as far as the eye could see. On the city’s western side lived most of its Egyptian population, many of them linen weavers, clustered around the hundred steps that led up to the Serapeum, the third-century temple that dominated the city and housed its secondary library. That rectangular temple—much of it decorated in gold leaf, silver, and bronze—stood on a rocky, artificial hill, surrounded by parks and porticoes. It is one of only three monuments of Cleopatra’s day that we can locate with accuracy today. The city’s Jewish quarter stood in the northeast, next to the palace. Greeks occupied the fine three-story houses at the center of town. Industry divided neighborhoods as well: one quarter was devoted to the manufacture of perfumes and to the fabrication of their alabaster pots, another to glassworkers.

From east to west the city measured nearly four miles, a wonderland of baths, theaters, gymnasiums, courts, temples, shrines, and synagogues. A limestone wall surrounded its perimeter, punctuated by towers, patrolled at both ends of the Canopic Way by prostitutes. During the day Alexandria echoed with the sounds of horses’ hooves, the cries of porridge sellers or chickpea vendors, street performers, soothsayers, moneylenders. Its spice stands released exotic aromas, carried through the streets by a thick, salty sea breeze. Long-legged white and black ibises assembled at every intersection, foraging for crumbs. Until well into the evening, when the vermilion sun plunged precipitously into the harbor, Alexandria remained a swirl of reds and yellows, a swelling kaleidoscope of music, chaos, and color. Altogether it was a mood-altering city of extreme sensuality and high intellectualism, the Paris of the ancient world: superior in its ways, splendid in its luxuries, the place to go to spend your fortune, write your poetry, find (or forget) a romance, restore your health, reinvent yourself, or regroup after having conquered vast swaths of Italy, Spain, and Greece over the course of a Herculean decade.

Given the transporting beauty and rapturous entertainments, Alexandria was not a city into which one sank passively. As a visitor noted, “It is not easy for a stranger to endure the clamor of so great a multitude or to face these tens of thousands unless he comes provided with a lute and a song.” Alexandrians embraced their reputation for frivolity. And through the massive portal of the palace hordes of well-wishers and Roman associates thronged at the war’s conclusion, gathering in the ivory-paneled entrance hall. With its array of banqueting rooms, that complex could accommodate a vast crowd; its largest hall was furnished with a dazzling collection of couches, sculpted of bronze, inlaid with ivory and glass, works of art unto themselves. Egypt imported its silver but long controlled the greatest gold reserve of the ancient world; the beams of that hall may have been themselves overlaid with gold. It is easy to inflate the city’s population, difficult to overstate its magnificence. It taxed the vocabularies even of the ancients. Plenty of wealthy Alexandrian households boasted furniture of Lebanon cedar inlaid with ivory and mother-of-pearl, sophisticated trompe l’oeil, and intricate, realistic mosaics. Slabs of caramel-colored alabaster sheathed exteriors. Interior walls shimmered with enamels and emeralds. Where wall decoration yielded to murals, mythological scenes predominated. The quality of the work was an astonishment.

The floor mosaics were in particular worked with a remarkable precision, heavy on geometrics, often three-dimensional in feel, implausibly realistic in their depictions of the natural world. At banquets those intricacies vanished under lush carpets of lilies and roses, with which Egypt was abundantly supplied. “The general rule,” gushed one chronicler, “is that no flower, including roses, snowdrops, or anything else, ever completely stops blooming.” Strewn in heaps over the floors, they lent the impression of a country meadow, if one littered at meal’s end by oyster shells, lobster claws, and peach pits. There was nothing rare about a banquet order for three hundred crowns of roses, or for as many braided garlands. (Roses were crucial, their fragrance believed to prevent intoxication.) Perfumes and unguents were Alexandrian specialties; attendants sprinkled cinnamon and cardamom and balsam perfumes on banqueters’ crowns as musicians played or storytellers performed. Fragrance rippled not only from the table but from jewelry, perfumed lamps, soles of shoes; the heavy scents of the oils inevitably flavored the dinner. The wares of the city’s other preeminent artisans were on display as well: Tables glinted with silver basins, pitchers, hundreds of candelabra. Blown glass was a Hellenistic invention on which Alexandria had worked its usual magic, gilding the already elaborate lily; the city’s glassblowers threaded gold into their work. On the table polychromatic vessels joined silver platters, woven ivory breadbaskets, jewel-encrusted tumblers. The meal itself appeared on gold dishes; at one Ptolemaic feast, the dinner vessels alone were said to have weighed three hundred tons. That tableware showcased both Cleopatra’s adaptability and her competitive instinct. When Alexandrian luxury began to make itself felt in the Roman world, Cleopatra renamed her ostentatious tableware. Her elaborate gold and silver place settings became her “ordinary ware.”

To one guest a palace dinner itself appeared as a fortune rather than a meal. He gaped at “a silver platter covered with heavy gold plate, and large enough to hold a huge roast piglet lying on its back and displaying its belly, which was full of many delicious items; for inside it were roast thrushes, ducks, and an immense quantity of warblers, as well as egg yolks, oysters, and scallops.” Geese were standard fare on the prodigal menus, along with peacocks, oysters, sea urchins, sturgeon, and red mullet, the delicacies of the Mediterranean world. (Spoons were rare, forks unknown. One ate with one’s fingers.) Sweet wines—the best came from Syria and Ionia—were spiced with honey or pomegranate. We have no trace of the wardrobe in which Cleopatra presided over these festivities, though we know that she wore plenty of pearls, the diamonds of the day. She coiled long ropes of pearls around her neck and braided more into her hair. She wore others sewn into the fabric of her tunics. Those were ankle-length and lavishly colored, of fine Chinese silk or gauzy linen, traditionally worn belted, or with a brooch or ribbon. Over the tunic went an often transparent mantle, through which the bright folds of fabric were clearly visible. On her feet Cleopatra wore jeweled sandals with patterned soles. Among the greatest hosts in history, the Ptolemies sent their guests stumbling home with gifts. It was not unusual to make off with a place setting of solid silver, a slave, a gazelle, a gold sofa, a horse in silver armor. Excess had put the Ptolemies on the map, where Cleopatra fully intended the dynasty to remain. Such were the “prolonged parties until dawn” of which Suetonius would write later.

The postwar festivities would certainly have included a victory procession, presumably down the Canopic Way. Cleopatra needed to unite her people, to assert her political supremacy, and to cement her claim over her detractors. Alexandria had long been a city of parades and pageantry, displays in which the wealth of the Ptolemies surpassed even the recreational fervor of their subjects. Centuries earlier a Dionysian procession had introduced gilded twenty-foot floats to the city streets, each requiring 180 men to coax it along. Purple-painted satyrs and gold-garlanded nymphs followed, along with allegorical representations of kings, gods, cities, seasons. A center of mechanical marvels, Alexandria boasted automatic doors and hydraulic lifts, hidden treadmills and coin-operated machines. With invisible wires, siphons, pulleys, and magnets the Ptolemies could work miracles. Fires erupted and died down; lights flickered from statues’ eyes; trumpets blared spontaneously. For the early procession, the city’s ingenious metalworkers outdid themselves: A fifteen-foot-tall statue in a yellow spangled tunic floated through the streets. She rose to her full height, poured offerings of milk, then magically reseated herself, enthralling the crowds. Around her the air was thick with the buzz of anticipation, the murmurs of admiration, the music of flutes. Clouds of incense—essentially moneyed air—settled on the spectators, for whom the burnished wonders continued: golden torch carriers, chests of frankincense and myrrh, gilded palm trees, grapevines, breastplates, shields, statues, basins, gold-adorned oxen. Atop one cart, sixty satyrs trampled grapes, singing as they did so, accompanied by pipers. Vast skins disgorged scented wine into the streets; the air was sweetened first by incense, again by those fragrant streams, a heady combination. Attendants released doves and pigeons over the course of the procession, each with ribbons dangling from its feet. A display of animals was obligatory for the subjects who had traveled to Alexandria and pitched tents for miles around. The third-century procession had included troops of decorated donkeys; elephants shod with gold embroidered slippers; teams of oryxes, leopards, peacocks, enormous lions, an Ethiopian rhinoceros, ostriches, an albino bear, 2,400 dogs. Camels carried loads of saffron and cinnamon. Behind them paraded 200 bulls with gilded horns. Lyre players followed, along with 57,000 infantry and 23,000 cavalry in full armor. Cleopatra would not have had those battalions but would all the same have mustered an extravagant display. The point was to advertise oneself, among monarchs, as “the shrewdest amasser of wealth, the most splendid spendthrift, and the most magnificent in all works.” Affluence, power, and legitimacy were inextricably bound together. Especially after the convulsions of the previous decades, it was essential that she confirm her authority.

Caesar may well have stayed to that end. A stable Egypt was as critical to his plans as to Cleopatra’s. Nearly alone in the Mediterranean, Egypt produced more grain than it consumed. Cleopatra could single-handedly feed Rome. The reverse was also true; she could starve that city if she cared to. For that reason Caesar was disinclined to install a countryman in Alexandria. A reliable non-Roman was the best solution. It is clear that Caesar trusted Cleopatra as he could not have trusted Pothinus, equally clear that he had confidence in her ability to rule. Strictly speaking, her Egypt became as of 47 a protectorate with an intimate twist. That arrangement was by no means unorthodox in a century when politics were markedly personal. Hellenistic alliances were regularly ratified with wedding vows. In Rome mercenary marriages were the order of the day, to the dismay of the purists, who railed at that brand of cheap, expedient diplomacy. The more ambitious the politician, the more variegated the marriages. Pompey had wed five times, always for political reasons. Caesar’s tumultuous career was closely tied to each of his four wives. Despite an age difference comparable to that between Caesar and Cleopatra, Pompey had married Caesar’s daughter, sent to him as a sort of thank-you note.^* Relations between the two men soured only when the woman who bound them died, a history that would shortly repeat itself, with far greater repercussions.

Caesar and Cleopatra’s relationship was unusual not only for its national differences, but because Cleopatra entered into it of her own will. No male relative forced her hand. To a Roman, that was highly discomfiting. Had her father in his lifetime married her to Caesar (an impossibility on any number of counts), she would have been seen altogether differently. What unsettled those who wrote her history was her independence of mind, the enterprising spirit. The poet Lucan is clear on this point. “Cleopatra has been able to capture the old man with magic,” he has Pothinus exclaim, in a broad redefinition of free will. Already in possession of Egypt, she in his account subsequently “whores to gain Rome.” Here too there were instructive parallels. The story would later be told of an early Indian monarch, Queen Cleophis. She “surrendered to Alexander but subsequently regained her throne, which she ransomed by sleeping with him, attaining by sexual favors what she could not by force of arms.” According to a Roman historian at least, for her degrading behavior Cleophis earned the epithet “royal whore.” The story may well be apocryphal, another lurid Roman fantasy about the beguiling East. It may even have been Cleopatra-inflected. But it tells us something of Cleopatra. She was as suspect as Queen Cleophis, though what the Romans mostly seized upon—what inspired backhanded tributes—was her uncanny, occult power.

That an easy rapport if not a great passion developed between Cleopatra and Caesar was unsurprising. Her aplomb and his gamble may have clinched the deal, but their personalities were as neatly matched as their political agendas. They were congenial, charismatic, quick-tongued people, if only one of them would go down in history as having been so seductive as to be dangerous. Cleopatra especially knew how to ingratiate. Where there had been thought to be four kinds of flattery, Plutarch sputtered, always on guard against that noxious brew, “she had a thousand.” We have more tributes to the caress of her wit than to Caesar’s; his is to be read less in his language than in his innumerable affairs. He was a masterly seducer, with a specialty in aristocratic wives. Both Cleopatra and Caesar manifested the intellectual curiosity that was the trademark of their age, a lightheartedness and a humor that set them apart from their peers, insofar as either had peers. Such an unsociable, solitary thing is power, notes Plutarch; generally those around Caesar and Cleopatra could be relied upon to fawn or plot. Both knew, as Caesar put it, that success came at a price, that “everything that lifts people above their fellows arouses both emulation and jealousy.” Theirs was an exclusive brand of social isolation.

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 produce 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.