Cleopatra: A Life

THE GOLDEN AGE NEVER WAS THE PRESENT AGE

Servant: “What excuses shall I make if I am away from the house for a long time?”

Andromache: “You will find no shortage of pretexts. After all, you are a woman.”

—EURIPIDES

CAESAR LEFT EGYPT on June 10, far later than he should have. Rome had been without word from him since December and was in turmoil, as he surely knew. The mails worked perfectly well. In what was as much a personal as a political favor, he took Cleopatra’s sister—still a “sibling-loving god” in name if not demeanor—with him as a prisoner of war. To protect Cleopatra, 12,000 of the legionnaires who had followed Caesar remained in Egypt, again a gesture both personal and political. Civil unrest was in neither of their best interests. Caesar indeed appears to have been disinclined to leave Cleopatra, although it is implausible that she proposed accompanying him to Rome that summer, as Dio claims. There was almost certainly talk of a reunion before the departure, which Caesar seems to have delayed and delayed until he could do so no longer.

Two weeks later Cleopatra went into labor. We know as little of the actual birth as we do of the intimacy that preceded it.^* With or without a birthing stool, a team of midwives would have stood at the ready. One received the child in a bundle of cloth, securely swaddling him. A second cut the umbilical cord with an obsidian blade. The newborn was to be amply filled with milk, to which end a royal wet nurse was engaged. The requirements for the job were no different from those for a sitter today: The nurse should be congenial and clean. She should “not be prone to anger, not talkative nor indifferent in the taking of food, but organized and sensible.” Ideally, she should also be Greek, which was to say educated. Typically she was the lucky wife of a court official; hers was a well-remunerated, prestigious post, several years in duration. To it she brought generations’ worth of wisdom. Teething trouble? The standard cure was to feed the child a fried mouse. Excessive crying? A paste of fly dirt and poppy could be counted on to silence the most miserable of infants.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nowhere was the Eastern influence so profoundly felt as in the triumphs Caesar celebrated at the end of September. A Roman general knew no greater glory than those elaborate, self-aggrandizing entertainments. And Caesar had particular reason to take his to new heights. Rome had long been fitful, unsettled by a protracted war and his extended absence. What better way to tame it than with an unprecedented eleven days of public festivities? At such times a general became an impresario; in celebrating his conquests of Gaul, Alexandria, Pontus, Africa, and Spain, Caesar outdid himself, consciously or not vying with the kind of staging he had witnessed in Alexandria. After massive preparations and several disappointing delays, the celebrations began on September 21, 46. They lasted through the first days of October. Rome filled with raucous spectators, only a fraction of whom could be accommodated. Many pitched tents in the city streets and along the roads. In throngs they flocked to the feasts, the parades, and the entertainments; some were trampled to death in the pandemonium. Temples and streets were decorated, temporary stadiums constructed, racecourses expanded. Glory had long been the currency of Rome, but it had never before been a city in which forty elephants bearing lit torches in their trunks escorted a general home at the end of a day’s festivities, a parade of revelers and musicians trailing behind. Nor had Rome ever seen banquets of delicacies and fine wines for 66,000 people.

Cleopatra may have already been installed in Caesar’s villa by late summer, when he celebrated his Egyptian triumph. Trumpets heralded his approach that morning; in his purple tunic, a wreath of laurels on his bald head, he rode through the city gates in a chariot drawn by four white horses. The crowd greeted him with rose petals and applause. His exultant men marched beside him in metal-plated tunics, chanting both victory odes and obscenities about the romantic conquests abroad. In their raillery Cleopatra’s name figured as a punch line, a charge that Caesar in no way denied. By tradition, the procession included the spoils of the campaign and representations of the vanquished; from the Campus Martius in the north to the Via Sacra, through the Circus Maximus and up the Capitoline Hill, rode effigies of Achillas and Pothinus, along with outsize paintings of the Nile and a model of the lighthouse of Alexandria. The crowds roared with approval. The Egyptian float was itself plated with glossy tortoiseshell, a material new to Rome and one that supported Caesar’s boasts about the riches he had acquired abroad. Each of the triumphs included feasts and public performances; athletic contests, stage plays, horse races, musical competitions, displays of wild animals, circus feats, and gladiatorial fights took place all over the city. For three weeks Rome was a thief’s paradise, as houses emptied for the spectacle. After the Egyptian triumph came a mock sea battle, for which an artificial lake was engineered. That match featured four thousand rowers and some of the defeated Egyptian ships, which Suetonius would have us believe Caesar towed across the Mediterranean for the occasion.

Certainly Cleopatra did not need to be on hand when Caesar assured the people of the bounties on which Rome might draw abroad, as good an explanation as any for his Egyptian interlude. They exulted in his largesse, which was properly hers. Caesar’s soldiers and officers made out handsomely. On every citizen Caesar also bestowed 400 sesterces—the equivalent of more than three months’ wages—along with gifts of wheat and olive oil. It is even less likely that Cleopatra would have wished to have been on hand for the Egyptian triumph, a reminder that she was not the only Ptolemaic woman in Rome. Each of the processions ended with a multitude of human captives. (So crucial were they that at an earlier triumph Pompey had appropriated prisoners that did not belong to him. Their number quantified a general’s success.) The more exotic the prisoner the better; Caesar’s African procession—the last of the performances of 46—included the five-year-old African prince who, in an odd twist of events, was to marry Cleopatra’s daughter.^* In his Egyptian procession Caesar included another novelty, though one to which the Romans did not thrill as they did to the miniature African prince or the exotic “cameleopard.” Wrapped in golden shackles, Cleopatra’s teenaged sister, Arsinoe, rode through the streets. Behind her followed the spoils and the prisoners of the Egyptian campaign. Intended to impress, this unusual piece of booty instead disturbed the crowd. Arsinoe proved too much for her audience, unaccustomed, Dio tells us, to the sight of “a woman and once considered a queen, in chains—a spectacle which had never yet been seen, at least in Rome.” Awe curdled to compassion. Tears sprang to eyes. Arsinoe drove home the human cost of the war, which had affected nearly every family. Even if Cleopatra remained pitiless on her sister’s account, even if she preferred to read Caesar’s victory as one over a previous administration, she had little to gain from this brutal reminder of Egypt’s subjugation. She had narrowly escaped the same disgrace.

As it happened, glamorous guests were as problematic as glamorous prisoners. It is difficult to say which Ptolemy ultimately caused the Romans the greater discomfort: the royal prisoner whom Caesar degraded in the streets, or the foreign queen with whom he consorted at his villa. Soon enough Arsinoe would be banished, dispatched across the Aegean to the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, a gleaming, white marble wonder of the world. Her older sister spent the winter on the less fashionable side of the Tiber. She was without word from Alexandria, as the sailing season was over, to reopen only in March. She would be for some time too without Caesar, who left Rome abruptly, early in November. He was off to Spain, for a final campaign against the Pompeians. Cleopatra had known difficult postings before—the desert of the western Sinai comes most readily to mind—but for all the beauty of the Janiculum villa and its panoramic view, this one was less than comfortable. Her welcome was not universally cordial. Rome was chilly, and wet. Latin did not come easily to a Greek speaker; Cleopatra was at a linguistic disadvantage. And in a city where women enjoyed the same legal rights as infants or chickens, the posting called upon a whole new set of skills. For good reason 46 may have felt to Cleopatra like the longest year in history, as—on account of the attenuated calendar—indeed it was.

CLEOPATRA HAD IN Rome the problem of any celebrity abroad: she knew few people, but everyone knew her. Her presence loomed large, only partly on account of Calpurnia, no stranger to such affronts. Caesar had married his third wife in 59 and spent the intervening years delivering up infidelities, from across town as ably as from abroad. He was himself never above suspicion. He had slept with most of his colleagues’ wives, in one case with both a very beautiful mother and her young daughter, whom he had the good taste to seduce sequentially. Between his departure from Alexandria and the return to Rome he had found time even for a dalliance with the wife of the king of Mauretania, an affair to which some—in a swoon of romantic logic—have ascribed Cleopatra’s visit. To compete with a wife was one thing. To compete with another Eastern sovereign, even one of lesser import, quite another. (This puts a more emotional spin on the matter than either the era or the evidence allows.) More problematic was Caesar’s marked affection for a woman who stood so far outside of, and on many fronts in opposition to, the mores of Rome.

While little about Cleopatra evoked affection abroad, all elicited curiosity. This would have imposed certain restrictions on her movements. It is difficult to believe she appeared often in unmannerly Rome. More likely Caesar visited her in his villa, which he could not have done discreetly. Ptolemies had been Roman houseguests before—Auletes had lodged with Pompey—but the relationship was dissimilar. It was next to impossible for either Caesar or Cleopatra to have done anything secretly; a curtained litter hurtled through the streets by a team of burly Syrians tended to attract attention. (Auletes had traveled about on the shoulders of eight men and with an escort of a hundred swordsmen. There is little reason to believe that his daughter interpreted pomp differently. Certainly she moved about Rome only with bodyguards, advisers, and attendants.) A great man did not travel without his scarlet cloak and retinue; by late 45, Caesar had moreover taken to parading about in red calf-high boots. And by all accounts Rome was a city in which the stones themselves seemed to talk. As Juvenal reminds us, a wealthy Roman deluded himself if he believed in secrets. “Even if his slaves keep quiet, his horses will talk and so will his dog and his doorposts and his marble floors.” You could take every possible precaution: “All the same, what the master does at the second cock-crow will be known to the nearest shopkeeper before dawn, along with all the fictions of the pastry cook, the head chefs, and the carvers.” Fortunately Cleopatra had little reason to cover her tracks. Nighttime escapades in canvas bags figured nowhere on her agenda.

Caesar made at least one very public attempt to integrate the queen of Egypt into Roman life. In September he dedicated an ornate temple in his Forum to Venus Genetrix, the goddess from whom he claimed descent and to whom he ascribed his victories, as well as the divine mother of the Roman people. Caesar was said to be “absolutely devoted” to Venus, eager to persuade his colleagues “that he had received from her a kind of bloom of youth,” no doubt all the more so as his cheeks hollowed, the skin pouched under his eyes, and his hairline vanished entirely. In his favorite temple, at what was essentially his business address, he installed a gold, life-size statue of Cleopatra beside Venus. It was a signal honor, the more so as Caesar had not yet erected a statue of himself. The tribute made some sense; to the Roman mind, Isis and Venus were, in their maternal roles, closely allied. As homages went, it was also excessive and perplexing, an unprecedented step beyond what was required of Caesar if Cleopatra had come, as Dio maintains, for official recognition “among the friends and allies of the Roman people.” That diplomatic formula mattered—it had been worth its weight in Auletes’ gold—but had not previously entailed costly statues of foreign monarchs at sacred addresses in the heart of Rome. It struck an odd chord in a city where humans did not traditionally mingle among cult images.

Cleopatra may or may not have fully grasped the irregularity of Caesar’s tribute; gold statues were not new to her. She would in his villa have acutely felt the oddities of the situation. The very palette of Rome was different. She was accustomed to ocean views, invigorating sea breezes, to sparkling white walls and a cloudless Alexandrian sky. There was no glinting turquoise Mediterranean out her window, no purple light at the end of the day. Nor was there any rapturous architecture. Rome was monochromatic next to the blaze of color to which Cleopatra was accustomed. All was wood and plaster. Music pervaded every aspect of Alexandrian life, where the flutes and lyres, rattles and drums, were everywhere. Only reluctantly did the Romans admit such frivolities to their culture. One apologized for one’s ability to dance or play the flute well. “No one dances while he is sober,” offered Cicero, the greatest of Roman killjoys, “unless he happens to be a lunatic.”^*

If she spent any time in the thick of the city, Cleopatra found herself amid a gloomy welter of crooked, congested streets, with no main avenue and no central plan, among muddy pigs and soup vendors and artisans’ shops that tumbled out onto footways. By every measure a less salubrious city than Alexandria, Rome was squalid and shapeless, an oriental tangle of narrow, poorly ventilated streets and ceaseless, shutter-creaking commotion, perpetually in shadow, stiflingly hot in summer. Isolated though Cleopatra was on her wooded hill, there were advantages too in Caesar’s address. She was at a remove from the incessant hawking and haggling, the pounding of blacksmiths and the hammering of stonemasons, the rattling of chains and squeaking of hoists below. Rome was a city of nonstop construction, as homes collapsed or were torn down regularly. To ease the racket Caesar had curtailed daytime traffic in the streets, with the predictable result: “You have to be a very rich man to get sleep in Rome,” asserted Juvenal, who cursed the evening stampede, and felt he risked his life each time he set foot outside. To be trampled by litters or splattered with mud constituted peripheral dangers. Pedestrians routinely crumpled into hidden hollows. Every window represented a potential assault. Given the frequency with which pots propelled themselves from ledges, the smart man, warned Juvenal, went to dinner only after having made his will. Cleopatra had any number of reasons to yearn for what a Latin poet would later term her “superficially civilized country.”

At the time of her visit Rome had only just discovered urban design, another Eastern import. You would search in vain for the famous landmarks; the Coliseum, “the last word in amphitheatres,” had not yet been built. Nor were the Pantheon or the Baths of Caracalla. Pompey’s theater had been Rome’s only structure of distinction; it had inspired Caesar’s Forum, which now eclipsed it. Rome remained provincial, but increasingly aware of itself as such. Greece continued to spell culture, elegance, art. If you wanted a secretary, a doctor, an animal trainer, a craftsman, you wanted a Greek. And if you wanted a bookstore, you dearly hoped to find yourself in Alexandria. It was difficult to get a decent copy of anything in Rome, which nursed a healthy inferiority complex as a result. It manifested itself the time-honored way: The Roman waxed superior. His was hardly the first civilization merrily to impugn the one it aspired to be. So the pyramids—marvels of engineering and of ancient exactitude, constructed with primitive tools and equally primitive arithmetic—could be reduced to “idle and foolish ostentations of royal wealth.” Gulping down his envy with a bracing chaser of contempt, a Roman in Egypt found himself less awed than offended. He wrote off extravagance as detrimental to body and mind, sounding like no one so much as Mark Twain resisting the siren call of Europe. Staring an advanced civilization straight in the face, the Roman reduced it either to barbarism or decadence. He took refuge in the hard edges and right angles of his own language, even while—sniffing and scorning—he acknowledged it to be inferior to the sinuous, supple, all-accommodating Greek tongue. Latin kept its speaker on the straight and narrow. Regrettably, there was no word in that language for “not possessing.” But neither, blessedly, was there a Latin term for “gold-inlay utensils” or “engraved glasses from the warm Nile.”

With Caesar’s overseas campaigns, with Rome’s rising might and fortune, the splendors of the Greek world began to penetrate the Italian peninsula. It would be difficult to overstate the ramifications of those imports for Cleopatra. Pompey had only just introduced ebony to Rome. Myrrh and cinnamon, ginger and pepper, were newly arrived. For the first time, decorative pillars graced the entries of private homes. Only one house in Rome sported marble-paneled walls, although in a few years that home would be rivaled by a hundred others. The culinary arts flourished, as turbot, stork, and peacock found their place on tables. During Cleopatra’s stay the relative virtues of mantis prawns versus African snails were vigorously debated. Hers was a Rome in transition; there were both luxurious entertainments and those who stole the fine linen napkins. Latin literature was in its infancy and Greek literature soon to be discounted, written off—the metaphor was apt—as a beautiful vase full of poisonous snakes. The beauty of a toga—that plain, natural wool garment, as uncomfortable as it was impractical—was, like the Latin language itself, in the constraints. At his entertainments Caesar arranged for silk awnings, to shade the spectators along the Via Sacra and up the Capitoline Hill. As Alexandrian imports, those awnings automatically qualified as “a barbarian luxury.”

With the nouveau riche embrace of the East came those who parsed each import and read in it the end of civilization, the road to degeneracy. To that end Caesar reenacted the city’s long-neglected sumptuary laws, designed to curb private expenditures. He was strict on this count as only a lover of magnificence—as the first host in history to offer his guests a selection of four fine wines—can be. He dispatched agents to confiscate delicacies in the market, to confiscate ornate tableware, midmeal, in private homes. With few exceptions, he prohibited litters, scarlet garments, pearls. To anyone accustomed to Alexandria, the fashion capital of the world, the idea that Caesar’s Rome needed sumptuary laws was laughable. A woman who knew when it was time to downgrade her dinnerware could be trusted to dress appropriately, however; Cleopatra may have toned down the wardrobe. A Roman matron wore white, where the Alexandrian woman relished color. And a woman who could calibrate her humor for different audiences knew better than to scorn a dinner that in no way rivaled her fare at home. As has been observed over the millennia, luxury is more easily denounced than denied; Caesar’s edict was more popular with some than others. It won few points from Cicero, who weaned himself with difficulty that winter from peacock, giant oysters, and saltwater eel. (Peacock meat was notoriously tough, but that was not the point.) Oysters and eels, Cicero moaned, had never offended his digestive system as did turnips.

What Cleopatra thought of the puritans—real and purported—among whom she found herself we do not know. We know well what they thought of her. Marriage, and women, were done differently in Rome, where female authority was a meaningless concept. (Similarly, for a man to be called effeminate was the worst insult.) The Roman definition of a good woman was an inconspicuous woman, something that defied Cleopatra’s training. In Alexandria she needed to make a spectacle of herself. Here the mandate was reversed. Not only was a Roman woman without political or legal rights, but she was without a personal name; she carried only the one derived from her father. Caesar had two sisters, both named Julia. Roman women cast their eyes down in public, where they were silent and recessive. They did not issue the dinner invitations. They were invisible in intellectual life, represented less often in art than they were in Egypt, where female workers and female pharaohs appear in painting and sculpture, in tomb scenes and on chapel walls, trapping birds, selling goods, or making offerings to the gods.

For a foreign sovereign the rules—like the sumptuary laws—did not entirely apply, but Cleopatra could not have felt at her ease.^* As always, what kept women pure was the drudge’s life. ( Juvenal supplied the traditional formula: “Hard work, short sleep, hands chafed and hardened” from housework.) As a marriage crasher who had somehow hustled herself into Venus’s exalted company, Cleopatra unsettled Rome on any number of counts: she was female and foreign, an Eastern monarch in what still believed itself to be a king-crushing republic, a stand-in for Isis, whose cult was suspect and subversive and whose temples were notorious spots for assignations. Cleopatra confused the categories and flouted convention. Even by modern standards, she posed problems of protocol. If she was the mistress of a Roman dictator, was she mistress of the Roman world as well? No matter how she comported herself—at all times she seems to have been as deft with her image as her person—she broke every rule in the book. A queen at home, she was a courtesan out of her country. And she was something more dangerous still: a courtesan with means. Cleopatra was not merely economically independent, but richer than any man in Rome.

Her very wealth—the same wealth that had fed Rome during the triumphs—impugned her morals. To wax eloquent on someone’s embossed silver, his sumptuous carpets, his marble statuary, was to indict him. The implications were greater for the lesser sex. “There’s nothing a woman doesn’t allow herself, nothing she considers disgusting, once she has put an emerald choker around her neck and has fastened giant pearls to her elongated ears,” went the logic. In that respect the length of her ears would do more to seal Cleopatra’s fate than that of her nose.^* Even assuming she had left her best jewelry in Alexandria, she was synonymous in Rome with the “reckless extravagance” of that world. It was no less than her birthright. (A proper Roman woman considered her children her jewels.) By Roman standards, even Cleopatra’s eunuchs were rich. This meant that every unpardonable evil in the profligacy family attached itself to her. Well before she became the sorceress of legend—a reckless, careless destroyer of men—she was suspect as an extravagant Easterner, a reckless, careless destroyer of wealth. If moral turpitude began with shellfish and metastasized into purple and scarlet robes, it found its ostentatious apogee in pearls, which topped the extravagance scale in Rome. Suetonius invoked them to prove Caesar’s weakness for luxury. The story of the libertine who sacrificed a pearl to make his point was an oft-told tale, on the books long before 46 and fated to stay there, to indict others, long after. It seemed, however, tailor-made for an audacious Egyptian queen. (There are signs of confabulation as well as conflation here. Within a matter of years, Cleopatra was said to have worn “the two pearls that were the largest in the whole of history.” Pliny assigned each a value of 420 talents, which meant Cleopatra dangled the equivalent of a Mediterranean villa from each ear. The sum was the same that she had contributed to the burial of the Memphis bull.) Who else could have been so frivolous, so wanton, so ready to enchant a man that she would pluck a pearl from her lobe, dissolve it in vinegar, and swallow it, to beguile a man with magic and excess?^* Such was the story that would circulate later about Cleopatra.

Neither the magic nor the excess was likely to have been much on display over the winter of 46. Cleopatra clearly frequented some fashionable addresses, though it was difficult to believe she was not often at home in Caesar’s villa, surrounded solely by her advisers and retainers. Some of those courtiers knew their way around Rome, having lobbied for her father’s notorious restoration. She lived these months in Latin; whatever her proficiency in that language, she discovered that certain concepts did not translate. Even the sense of humor was different, broad and salty in Rome where it was ironic and allusive in Alexandria. Literal-minded, the Romans took themselves seriously. Alexandrian irreverence and exuberance were in scant supply.

When spring rolled around and the sea reopened, Cleopatra may have sailed home, to return to Rome later in the year. Two consecutive visits seem more likely than a single extended one; she could hardly have justified an eighteen-month absence, no matter how confident she felt of her authority in Egypt. That would have entailed a grueling amount of travel, though the southbound trip was a less taxing one. Assuming she returned to Alexandria in 45, she set out in late March or early April, by which time the northeasterly squalls had abated, the thunder and lightning off the coast of Egypt with them. One did not brave the gales in winter. One did so only with trepidation in the spring, once “the leaves at the top of the fig tree are as big as the footprint a crow leaves as it goes.” If Cleopatra indeed sailed home early in 45, she was again in Rome by the fall. Only an interim return to Alexandria makes sense of Suetonius’s account, in which Caesar saw Cleopatra off from Rome. He would not have a second opportunity to do so.

To Suetonius, working from a broad collection of sources if over a century and a half later, the parting was as reluctant as the about-face on the Nile. The Roman commander “did not let her leave until he had laden her with high honours and rich gifts.” He acknowledged Caesarion as his son and “allowed her to give his name to the child.” There was no reason for him to hesitate to do so. At least in 45, Caesar’s plans could only be furthered by an Eastern heir and a living link to Alexander the Great. He was also conceding the obvious. If he had not already begun to do so, two-year-old Caesarion soon enough resembled his father in looks and manner. The acknowledgment may have been the point of the reunion; Caesarion’s recognition was easily worth any number of trips across the Mediterranean. As one historian has it—and as many have noted under similar circumstances before and since—their child “was her best card if she aimed at pinning Caesar down to a previous agreement or promise.” The nature of that promise eludes us, aside from formal recognition as a friend of Rome, which had cost Cleopatra’s father the astounding sum of 6,000 talents.

How else to account for the extended Roman stay or stays? There was too much at stake to subscribe to sentiment over politics. Caesar had summoned Cleopatra once before; his own motives over these eighteen months are among the most probed and least understood in history. It is plausible that the two were planning some kind of future together, as many would conclude, to Caesar’s discredit. At the end of her life Cleopatra had in hand a clutch of passionate, admiring letters from Caesar, at least some of which he must have written to her between 48 and 46. Here was the historical version of that beautiful vase of poisonous snakes. It is possible that Cleopatra felt she needed to press her case personally with Caesar’s colleagues, to confirm that Egypt was to remain a friend and ally of Rome under her rule. The Senate was a less than cohesive body, invested in private agendas and by no means unanimously inclined toward Caesar’s. She knew intimately of its factions; to broaden her base of support abroad was to secure the throne at home. (Cicero’s take on official Rome was less flattering: “A more raffish assemblage never sat down in a low-grade music hall,” he huffed about a jury of his peers.) Cleopatra’s second visit would have coincided with Caesar’s autumn return from Spain in 45, by which time he expected to turn to a reorganization of the East. She could not afford to be left out of that conversation, if only for the sake of Cyprus, which formally belonged to her brother, and which had a tendency to resist her authority. If Cleopatra had greater plans still, they are lost to us today. Certainly it was easy to assign her spectacular, designing motives; Rome was accustomed to scheming Ptolemies. What survives instead is the cost of Cleopatra’s reunion with Caesar. It was ruinous. While she may have spent her days as quietly as Homer’s Penelope, she wound up more like a calamity-causing Helen of Troy. This was to be her illogical adventure.