Cleopatra: A Life

MAN IS BY NATURE A POLITICAL CREATURE

“O would that the female sex were nowhere to be found—but in my lap!”

—EURIPIDES

“I DON’T KNOW how a man of any sense can be happy at the present time,” Cicero had grumbled shortly before Cleopatra first set foot in Rome. After an appalling decade of war, the mood in Rome was sour, that of Cicero—its most prominent citizen, and the most articulate of its discontents—even more so. For some months the city had been in a state of “general perturbation and chaos,” as Cleopatra was well aware. Her intelligence would have been detailed. She and her courtiers enjoyed contacts at high levels of society. She could afford to neglect no feature of the political landscape. Throughout town, anxiety about the future was universal. Caesar’s civic reforms were promising, but how and when would he put the Republic back together again? Over years of war it had been turned upside down, the constitution trampled, appointments made on whim and against the law. Caesar took few steps toward restoring traditional rights and regulations. Meanwhile his powers expanded. He took charge of most elections and decided most court cases. He spent a great deal of time settling scores, rewarding supporters, auctioning off his opponents’ properties. The Senate appeared increasingly irrelevant. Some groused that they lived in a monarchy masquerading as a republic. There were three possibilities for the future, predicted an exasperated Cicero, “endless armed conflict, eventual revival after a peace, and complete annihilation.”

When Caesar returned from Spain that fall he had annihilated the surviving Pompeians. The civil war was, Caesar announced, finally over. He settled in Rome for what was to be his longest uninterrupted stay in fourteen years. Whether it was conducted circumspectly or not, he and Cleopatra continued their affair. To many her reasons for being in Rome may have been as opaque as they are to us. She had experience with unpopularity; it would have come in handy now. She lived at a less than desirable address, on a slippery grade between superiority and slight. At the same time, it is impossible to believe that she failed to elicit brisk curiosity, if not starry-eyed admiration. She presumably continued her father’s generous gift-giving tradition; he had handed out lavish bribes and incurred great debts, equally fine reasons to seek out his daughter. She was intellectually agile, which always impressed Romans.

Fashion paused to acknowledge her presence; Cleopatra set off a brief vogue for an elaborate hairstyle, in which rows of braids were knotted cornrow-style and caught in a bun behind the head. Rome was moreover a stratified, status-obsessed society. Rank mattered; learning mattered; money mattered. Cleopatra was a member of the elite, to whom the social mores were familiar. So far as the conversation went, a sophisticated Roman dinner was little different from a sophisticated Alexandrian dinner. A subtle and clever guest, Cleopatra would have warmed to the political gossip and to the kind of learned, leisurely discourse prized in Rome, the brand of talk that was said to improve the wine. In the definition of an erudite contemporary, the ideal dinner companion was “neither a chatterbox nor a mute.” Over the course of several late afternoon hours, he discoursed fluently on a variety of political, scientific, and artistic subjects, taking aim at the eternal questions: What came first, the chicken or the egg? Why does distance vision improve with age? Why do Jews shun pork? Cleopatra had Caesar’s favor; she could not have been friendless. (For his part, Caesar paid no heed to the tongues that wagged over her presence. “He was not at all concerned, however, about this,” Dio assures us.) At Caesar’s villa she was surrounded by distinguished intellectuals and seasoned diplomats. She was refined, generous, charismatic. Some impressions may well have been favorable. We are left, however, with the testimony of a sole witness, at once the most silver- and acid-tongued of Romans, who, it was noted, could always be counted on for “a great deal of barking.” “I detest the queen,” railed Cicero. History belongs to the eloquent.

The great orator was at the time of Cleopatra’s visit a gray and grizzled sixty-year-old monument of a man, still handsome, the even features melting into jowls. In the thick of a furious writing spree, Cicero devoted himself over Cleopatra’s time in Rome to the composition of a host of wide-ranging philosophical works. He had the previous year divorced his wife of three decades to marry his wealthy teenaged ward, for which exchange he offered up reasons similar to those that had brought Cleopatra to Rome in the first place: “I knew no security, had no refuge from intrigue, because of the villainy of those to whom my welfare and estate should have been most precious.” To his mind the solution was obvious: “Therefore I thought it advisable to fortify myself by the loyalty of new connections against the treachery of old ones.” In other words, Cicero—a self-made man from a provincial family, who had risen to prominence on his blazing intellectual gifts and maintained his place there by ceaseless politicking—remarried for money.

It is no more surprising that Cicero called on Cleopatra in the first place than it is that he came to lash her, with a quick and brutal tongue, for the ages. Generally the great Cicero had two modes: fawning and captious. He could apply both equally well to the same individual; he was perfectly capable of maligning a man one day and swearing eternal devotion to him the next. He was a great writer, which is to say self-absorbed, with an outsize ego and a fanatical sensitivity to slights real and imagined. The Roman John Adams, he lived his life with one eye always on posterity. He fully expected that we would be reading him two thousand years later. As accomplished a busybody as he was a master of eloquence, Cicero made it his mission to know precisely which lands every eminent man in Rome possessed, as well as where he lived and what company he frequented. Having stood at the center stage of Roman politics for three decades, he refused to be sidelined. He was irresistibly drawn to power and fame. No celebrity was going to escape his caustic clutches, especially one with an intellectual bent, a glamorous, international reputation, the resources to raise an army, and a habit of entertaining in a style that taxed the Roman vocabulary. The turnips sickened Cicero on several levels. He was a confirmed lover of luxury.

In the misunderstanding that seemed to seal her Roman fate, Cleopatra promised Cicero either a book or a manuscript, possibly one from her library in Alexandria. In any event, she failed to deliver. Plainly she had no regard for his feelings. Those were further frayed when her emissary turned up at Cicero’s home. Cleopatra’s man wanted not Cicero, but Cicero’s highly learned best friend. There is some murkiness here—two thousand years later we are also left parsing the great orator’s silences—but from Cicero’s deep ellipses and dark hints emerges a man less offended than embarrassed. Suddenly he felt on the defensive, chagrined either that he had asked a service of Cleopatra or that he had socialized with her in the first place. He sounds as if he may have been a little too charmed. To that friend he labored to make clear that his intercourse with the queen was “of a literary kind, not unbecoming to my position—I should not mind telling them to a public meeting.” Nothing untoward had transpired; Cleopatra’s representative could back him up on this. Cicero’s dignity had however been compromised. The result was a blistering rancor. He wanted nothing more to do with the Egyptian. What could she and her representatives have been thinking? Few have paid such a lasting price for a forgotten book; for her oversight, Cleopatra earned Cicero’s eternal enmity, though it should be noted that he worked himself up into a lather of indignation only after she had departed from Rome, to which she was unlikely to return. And despite his disaffection, he had clearly frequented the Egyptian queen—in society, if not at Caesar’s villa—a statement in itself.

Bibliographic slights aside, there were plenty of reasons why Cicero should have failed to take to Cleopatra. An unreconstructed Pompeian, he had no affection for Caesar, who condescended to Cicero and failed sufficiently to appreciate his wisdoms. Cicero had had harsh words for Cleopatra’s father. He had known Auletes and thought him a poor excuse for a king; he dismissed “his Alexandrian majesty” as “royal in neither blood nor spirit.” A dyed-in-the-wool republican, Cicero had already devoted more time than he would have liked to Egyptian affairs. They had about them always a whiff of dishonor. He had in Cleopatra’s youth hoped to be named envoy to her father’s court but worried about how history, and respectable Rome, might view that posting. Cicero had as well a vexed history with women. He had long complained that his first wife had too much taste for public affairs and too little for domestic ones. Having just rid himself of one strong-minded, strong-willed woman, he had no taste for another. By contrast he was passionately, deeply devoted to his daughter, on whom he had lavished a first-rate education. She died suddenly, in childbirth, in February 45. She was not yet thirty. Cicero spent the subsequent months crippled by grief. The pain was nearly physical. He was prone to fits of weeping, which friends gently urged him to restrain.^* The loss did nothing to endear to him another cultured and coolheaded young woman of his daughter’s generation, her future before her. When his new, teenaged wife proved insufficiently moved by his loss, Cicero got rid of her too, within months of the marriage.

“The arrogance of the Queen herself when she was living on the estate across the Tiber makes my blood boil to recall,” Cicero fumed in mid-44. On that count he had met his match. He admitted to “a certain foolish vanity to which I am somewhat prone.” Writing later, Plutarch was more explicit on the subject. Brilliant though he was, quotable though he was, Cicero was so keen on extolling himself as to be nauseating. He larded his works with shameless self-advertisements. Dio does not mince words either regarding Cicero: “He was the greatest boaster alive.” The vanity extended most of all to his library, arguably the real love of Cicero’s life. It is difficult to name anything in which he took more pleasure, aside possibly from evasion of the sumptuary laws. Cicero liked to believe himself wealthy. He prided himself on his books. He needed no further reason to dislike Cleopatra: intelligent women who had better libraries than he did offended him on three counts.

Cicero denounced Cleopatra for her insolence, though it should be said that “insolent” was quite possibly his favorite word. Caesar was insolent. Pompey had been insolent. Caesar’s trusted associate Mark Antony—for whom Cicero had many far less kind expressions—was insolent. Alexandrians were insolent. Victory in a civil war was insolent. Cicero was accustomed to being the most articulate person in the room. It was annoying that Cleopatra shared his sardonic wit. And was it really necessary for her to act regally? He sniffed that she comported herself like a queen, an offense to his republican sensibilities, no doubt all the more so for his undistinguished birth. Here he had a point. He was not the last to note Cleopatra’s high-handedness. Strategy came more naturally to her than did diplomacy. She may have been tactless; megalomania ran in the family. She had no trouble reminding those around her that—as she would assert later—she had for many years governed a vast kingdom by herself. Disdain is a natural condition of the mind in exile; Cleopatra had every reason to believe she hailed from a superior world. No one in Rome had a pedigree to rival hers. It bothered Cicero that she seemed to know as much.

Around the proud queen and the disconsolate philosopher the political situation meanwhile darkened. Caesar was preoccupied by military matters, little focused on the long-neglected issues toward which others urged him. The to-do list staggered. He needed to repair the courts, curtail spending, restore credit, resurrect the work ethic, welcome new citizens, improve public morality, elevate freedom over glory—in short, “rescue almost from the brink of ruin the most famous and powerful of cities.” Along with everyone else, Cicero found himself parsing Caesar’s motives, as thankless a task in 45 as it has proved ever since. At the end of the year a host of honors was heaped upon Caesar, essentially deifying him in the style of a Hellenistic monarch. Over the next months his statue was erected in temples. An ivory facsimile of his image graced processions, as would a god’s. His power swelled to awkward dimensions. (Cicero would be only too happy to catalogue the offenses later. In the meantime, he preened over his visits with the great general.) There was much grumbling about manner. During Cleopatra’s stay, Caesar comported himself as the man who had won 302 battles, who had fought the Gauls no fewer than thirty times, who “was impossible to terrify and was victorious at the end of every campaign.” On the other hand, he was ill inclined to compromise. He ignored tradition. He behaved too much like a military commander, too little like a politician. The flames of discontent broke out regularly, ably fanned by Cicero and any number of other ex-Pompeians.

In February 44, Caesar was named dictator for life. Further privileges rained down on him. He was to wear triumphal dress and to occupy a raised ivory and gold chair, suspiciously like a throne. His image was to grace Roman coins, a first for a living Roman. Resentment accumulated in equal measure, although it was the Senate itself that “encouraged him and puffed him up, only to find fault with him on this very account and to spread slanderous reports how glad he was to accept them and how he behaved more haughtily as a result of them.” Caesar perhaps erred in accepting the tributes but was also in something of a bind: to reject them was to risk offending. It is difficult to say which expanded to meet the other, the superhuman ego or the superhuman honors, under the weight of which Caesar would finally be buried. To complicate matters, Caesar busied himself that winter with a new and supremely ambitious campaign, one that promised to leave Rome again in the lurch. He set his sights on the conquest of Parthia, a nation that stood at Rome’s eastern frontier and that had long resisted its hegemony. The prospect was one guaranteed later to make Cleopatra groan, if it did not do so already. Though in disintegrating health and a fatalistic frame of mind, Caesar planned to clear Rome’s way to India. He was fifty-five years old, intent on a mission that would consume at least three years. It was the one at which Alexander the Great had nearly succeeded. Cicero doubted that Caesar would return were he actually to head off.

In the spring of 44 he sent sixteen legions and a sizeable cavalry ahead to Parthia, announcing a departure date of March 18. He made arrangements for his absence—presumably Cleopatra did too, and began to pack—but fears and doubts ricocheted around town. When would domestic issues be resolved? How would Rome survive without Caesar? That concern was legitimate, given the mixed performance Mark Antony had turned in during Caesar’s time in Egypt. His appointed deputy, Antony had been unreliable and ineffective. He had established a reputation for profligacy. For those who wondered primarily when Caesar would restore the Republic, an oracle of the winter was particularly unwelcome. A prophecy either materialized or was said to, asserting that Parthia could be conquered only by a king. Word had it that the title was to be conferred imminently on Caesar. That may have been little more than a rumor—oracles were nothing if not convenient—but it spoke to the thorny question of why Cleopatra was living in Caesar’s villa in the first place. Caesar may have had monarchical ambitions. Or he may not have. Certainly he was carelessly out of touch with Rome, less focused on domestic affairs than was wise, autocratic where he should have been solicitous. If one prefers not to be perceived as a king, one is ill advised, for starters, to spend one’s time consorting with a queen.

UNTIL 44 BC, the Ides of March were best known as a springtime frolic, an occasion for serious drinking, like so many others on the Roman calendar. A celebration of the ancient goddess of ends and beginnings, the Ides amounted to a sort of raucous, reeling New Year’s. Bands of revelers picnicked into the night along the banks of the Tiber, where they camped in makeshift huts under a full moon. It was a festival often indelibly recalled nine months later. In 44 the day dawned overcast; toward the end of the cloudy morning, Caesar set off by litter for the Senate, to finalize arrangements for his absence. The young and distinguished Publius Cornelius Dolabella hoped to be named consul in his place, as did Mark Antony, Dolabella’s rival in Caesar’s affections. The Senate assembled that day in one of the large chambers adjoining Pompey’s theater. All rose as Caesar entered, a laurel wreath on his head; at about eleven o’clock, he settled into his new golden chair. He was quickly surrounded by colleagues, many of them devoted friends. One extended a petition, which occasioned a flurry of importuning and kissing of hands. Caesar moved to dismiss the request, at which his petitioner—interrupting him in midsentence—reached out to yank Caesar’s toga roughly from his shoulder. It was the predetermined signal. With it the group closed in, baring daggers. Caesar twisted away from the initial knife, which only grazed him, but found himself powerless against the rain of blows that followed. Every conspirator had agreed to participate in the attack and did so, stabbing wildly at Caesar’s face, his thighs, his chest, and, occasionally, at one another. Caesar attempted to wrestle away, turning his sinewy neck “from one to another of them with furious cries like a wild beast.” He managed finally to emit a single groan and to muffle his face in the fabric of his robe—precisely as Pompey had done off the coast of Egypt—before sinking to the floor.

By the time his assailants rushed to the chamber doors, Caesar lay crumpled on the ground in a soggy purple heap, skewered twenty-three times, his clothing “bloodstained and cut to ribbons.” Their togas and senatorial shoes splattered in blood, the murderers fled in different directions, shouting that they had slain a king and tyrant. Terror and confusion swelled in their wake. In the uproar some assumed the entire Senate to be involved. A crowd that had been transfixed by a holiday gladiatorial contest emptied into the street; word flew around that gladiators were slaughtering senators. Others believed an army was at hand, prepared to pillage the city. “Run! Bolt doors! Bolt doors!” went the cries, as shutters slammed shut and Rome retreated behind lock and key, at homes and in workshops. Pandemonium yielded abruptly to paralysis: one minute “the whole place was full of people running and shouting,” while the next “the city looked as if it had been occupied by an enemy.” In the meeting hall Caesar’s body lay alone and untended for several hours, drenched in blood. No one dared touch it. Only late in the afternoon did three slave boys carry it away, amid hysterical weeping and mourning, from doorways and rooftops.

With the possible exception of Calpurnia, to whom the mutilated corpse was delivered, it is unlikely that the news affected anyone as profoundly as Cleopatra. No matter how it registered on a personal level, Caesar’s death represented a catastrophic political blow. She had lost her champion. Her situation was now insecure at best. The anxiety was great. Were his friends and relatives also to be murdered? Certainly Mark Antony—by rank the next in command—assumed so. Disguised as a servant, he went into hiding. When he resurfaced it was with a breastplate under his tunic. Those involved in the attack changed their clothes and vanished, as did their defenders. (Cicero approved of the murder but played no part in it. He fled as well.) Given Caesar’s anticipated departure, Cleopatra may well have been on the verge of leaving Rome by mid-March. She could by no means have anticipated this finale, however. For years there had been whispers of conspiracies against Caesar, talk that well predated her stay. As for the catalogue of portents, they are impeccable only in retrospect. They might at the time have added up to any number of futures; ancient history is oddly short on incorrect omens. Only later were the unmistakable signs fitted to the occasion, compiled by men who happened to believe Caesar’s murder as much justified as preordained.

The explanations similarly piled up later, history being a kind of omen-in-reverse enterprise. As they did so, Cleopatra began to assume a role in the murder. Her presence in Rome demanded an explanation and it got one. She resolved certain mysteries, corralled the stray motives and rogue details of Caesar’s story. There was for starters the stubborn problem of the Alexandrian stay. Whether a tribute to Cleopatra’s influence or her ambitions, it had to mean something. And what was the significance of her gilded image in the Forum, at Venus’s side? Idle tongues and poison pens were in great supply after March 15, when there was much accounting to do, when it became more and more clear that Caesar’s assassins had no set plan for the future and that Rome had suffered a terrible loss. Significantly, the person most likely to have incriminated Cleopatra does not: She figures nowhere on Cicero’s long list of Caesar’s missteps and offenses. In addressing a mournful Rome, Cicero invoked the destruction wrought by Helen of Troy, but he was speaking of Antony rather than Cleopatra.

Caesar had over the previous months evidenced an immoderate taste for extravagant, unprecedented honors. There had been much provocative playacting with diadems, an accessory from which any good Roman recoiled. Whether this was planned by Caesar or inflicted on him is unclear. It seems the first to offer those honors were also the first to condemn, that with each tribute Caesar’s colleagues prepared for him a sort of ambush, “because they wished to make him envied and hated as quickly as possible, that he might the sooner perish.” Caesar stood supreme; at least in retrospect, it seemed logical that he wanted to be a god in his country as Cleopatra was a goddess in hers. Soon it was bandied about that a law had been in the works “permitting him to have intercourse with as many women as he pleased.” (Suetonius cleaned this up, noting that Caesar was to be allowed to marry many wives “for the purpose of begetting children.”) He was to be allowed not only to have several wives but to wed his foreign mistress, not then possible under the law, which recognized only marriages between Romans. Caesar was said to have intended as well to transfer the capital of the empire to Alexandria. He was intent on “taking with him the resources of the state, draining Italy by levies, and leaving the charge of the city to his friends.” That account made sense not only of Cleopatra, but of the implicit insult that could be read into her lover’s architectural ambitions, his manic refashioning of Rome. The two Caesars—before Egypt and after Spain—were incompatible, and incomprehensibly so; Cleopatra supplied a neat dividing line. She could be said to explain his obsession with power and titles in the last five months of his life, the royal trappings and divine cravings, the wayward crowns and the oddly autocratic demeanor. By our century, she had come to have conspired in the diadem-distributing charades. She planted the absolutist ideal in Caesar’s mind and was poised to become empress of Rome. She exercised a decisive, corrupting influence on the Roman leader, to the extent that a new Caesar was born in Egypt—and to the extent that Cleopatra properly qualified as the founder of the Roman Empire.

Certainly Cleopatra contributed to Caesar’s downfall, although there is no evidence of imperial design on her part or on his, no treachery, or for that matter, any blinding, fatal passion. How much of a role she played is debatable. For all her persuasive talents, she was unlikely to have been much involved in domestic politics in any meaningful way. Were she and Caesar considering a joint monarchy? Possibly, but no evidence remains. Sometimes a business trip is just a business trip. Suetonius recognized the lot of the unadorned historical account, destined to be improved upon by “silly folk, who will try to use the curling-irons on his narrative.” The polymathic Nicolaus of Damascus, who tutored Cleopatra’s children, was the first to implicate Cleopatra. A century later Lucan was happy to follow that lead, neatly rolling her dual offenses against Caesar into a single line: “She aroused his greed.” Those assertions made for a better narrative than did the plain fact that Caesar had plenty of enemies for plenty of reasons, few of which had anything to do with either Egyptian queens or the Roman constitution. Even the reworking of the calendar had earned him enmity, as he had inadvertently curtailed the appointments of men in power. Those who had reason to be grateful to Caesar resented their debts. Others agonized over wartime losses. Some hoped only to upset the system. “And so,” conceded one contemporary, “every kind of man combined against him: great and small, friend and foe, military and political, every one of whom put forward his own particular pretext for the matter at hand, and as a result of his own complaints each lent a ready ear to the accusations of the others.”

On March 17 Caesar’s will was unsealed and read aloud at Mark Antony’s home, the large villa that had once been Pompey’s, and to which Antony had returned. Although Cleopatra had been in Rome in mid-September when Caesar composed that document, she figured nowhere in it. If she was disappointed she was not alone: It supported none of the nefarious motives attributed to Caesar. Rather the will read as one long rebuke to his assassins. He left the villa and grounds on which Cleopatra lived to the people of Rome. He bequeathed 75 drachmas to every adult Roman male in the city. He could not legally bequeath money to a foreigner and did not; he was hardly as tone-deaf as he had appeared in his last months. He made no provision for or acknowledgment of Caesarion. In a move that startled everyone, he made no provision either for Mark Antony, who had patently expected otherwise. Instead Caesar named Gaius Octavian, his eighteen-year-old grandnephew, as his heir. Formally adopting the boy, he granted him three fourths of his fortune, and—more valuably—his name. Antony was appointed Octavian’s guardian, along with several of Caesar’s close associates, who happened also to be his assassins.

Some believed business in Rome would simply continue as usual after the Ides. They did not count on Antony’s gift for spectacle. Three days later the city erupted in riots when Caesar’s funeral turned into a savage hunt for his murderers. Over the body, laid out, with its gaping wounds, on an ivory couch, Antony delivered a stirring oration. He was unshaved, a sign of mourning. On the Senate speakers’ platform he hitched up his robes so as to free both hands. A “proud and thunderous expression” fixed on his face, Antony chanted Caesar’s praises and catalogued his victories. It was at this time that he defended Caesar from charges of having delayed in Egypt out of voluptuousness. Effectively alternating his tone “from clarion-clear to dirge-like,” Antony delivered up a potent cocktail of pity and indignation. Never one to resist a flourish, he went on to display Caesar’s bloodied gray head. He then rather unhelpfully stripped the shredded, blood-stiffened clothes from the body and waved them about on a spear. The crowd went wild, indulging in a spur-of-the-moment cremation and destroying the hall in which Caesar had been killed. A frenzied spree of murder and arson followed, during which, as Cicero had it, “almost the whole city was burned down and once more great numbers were slaughtered.” Rome was very much unsafe for Cleopatra, or for that matter anyone. All the qualities the Romans attributed to the Alexandrians—those fanatical, intemperate, bloodthirsty barbarians—were on vivid display. In the marketplace a man wrongly understood to be an assassin was torn limb from limb.

Cleopatra was fortunate in one respect. Caesar’s assailants had repeatedly stalled, “for they stood in awe of him, for all their hatred of him, and kept putting the matter off.” Had they acted when they originally intended, she might have been forced to remain in agitated Rome. She was in town for the furious thunderstorm that followed the funeral, and to see the comet that streaked through the sky every evening that week. From her villa she looked out over a city that was generally pitch-black at night but was now dotted with campfires, stoked until dawn, in the name of public order. And then she was gone, her baggage loaded on wagons and conveyed down the winding road of the Janiculum Hill, by way of a series of switchbacks, to the river and toward the coast. The sailing season was newly open; presumably with the help of Caesar’s adherents, she made a hasty departure. Within a month of the Ides she was off, her progress carefully tracked by Cicero, her fate much discussed in Rome. The talk died down only in mid-May. Cicero waited a few more weeks—by which time Cleopatra was certain to be back in Alexandria, and the coast absolutely clear—to vent his disdain. “I detest the queen,” he only then exploded, his blood reboiling, without deigning to refer to her by name, a distinction he reserved for enemies and ex-wives. It grated still that he had asked Cleopatra a favor, or that he had compromised himself in doing so, or that he had opened himself to ridicule. Given the turn of events, defaming her suited his purposes as it had not before. Even Cleopatra’s representatives felt his wrath, indicted for “general rascality” and impertinence. How had he exposed himself to such rough treatment from that crew? “They must think I have no spirit, or rather that I hardly have a spleen,” he raged.

For Cleopatra the departure may have been especially fraught. She had made good on her identification with Venus and Isis; in March she was pregnant again, presumably visibly so, as the secret was out. Cicero had ample reason to follow her closely. A pregnant Cleopatra was the trophy wife who could, at a precarious juncture, complicate Rome’s future. Unlike Caesarion, this second child had been conceived on Roman soil. All of Rome knew it to be Caesar’s. What if Cleopatra bore a boy, and chose to press her case? Cicero may have worried that she could derail the succession. She was perfectly positioned to do so. It was in any event to be a season of disappointments for Cleopatra, who either miscarried in the course of her flight home or lost the baby shortly thereafter. In Rome Cicero breathed a deep sigh of relief.

On another level Cleopatra was richly rewarded. All parties agreed that none of Caesar’s “regulations, favours, and gifts” was to be revoked. Cyprus was secure. Cleopatra would remain a friend and ally of Rome. For its part, that city braced for “an orgy of loot, arson, and massacre,” as for a likely reprise of the civil war. After the Ides a lively market opened for defamation and self-justification. There was a run on self-congratulation. Toppling kings was a Roman tradition too, which the conspirators believed they had valiantly upheld that gray spring morning. Even neutral parties happily contributed to the hostilities. As Dio notes, “There is a very large element which is anxious to see all those who have power at variance with one another, an element which consequently takes delight in their enmity and joins in plots against them.”

Inculcated from her earliest days with the fear that Rome might dismantle her country, Cleopatra looked on as Rome proceeded instead to demolish itself. It lurched through a dull, damp, dark year, one in which the sun refused to emerge, “never showing its ordinary radiance at its rising, and giving but a weak and feeble heat.” (The reason was probably the eruption of Mount Etna in Sicily, though—the contemporary curling irons at work—Rome preferred the political explanation closer to home.) She could only have been pleased to put an ocean between her and the turmoil. Probably she sailed from Puteoli, along the Italian coast, through the rough and inhospitable Strait of Messina, to find herself swept across the open Mediterranean, in April. The wind was at her back. The southbound crossing was an effortless one; an aggressive captain could make the trip in less than two weeks. Within a matter of days Cleopatra traded the persistent gloom and chilly air of Europe for the opulent warmth of Egypt. In sunny Alexandria she returned to the grind of public business and private audiences, to a round of rituals and ceremonies. She would never again set foot in Rome. Nor would she ever let that city out of her sights. She had played the game cannily and correctly, more effectively than any Ptolemy before her, only to find herself back at square one, blindsided by events, sabotaged by a wholesale revision of the rules. As a near contemporary marveled: “Who can adequately express his astonishment at the changes of fortune, and the mysterious vicissitudes in human affairs?” Cleopatra was twenty-six years old.

IN A LIFE of barely salvaged, emotionally overblown scenes, the 44 return to Alexandria is the one that got away, also the most opera-ready. No librettist has touched it, possibly because there is no text. For a woman who was to be celebrated for her masterly manipulation of Rome, Cleopatra’s story would be entrusted primarily to that city’s historians; she effectively ceases to exist without a Roman in the room. None stood at hand that spring as she sailed toward the red-tiled rooftops of Alexandria, around the flickering lighthouse and the colossal statues of earlier Cleopatras, through the stone breakwaters and into her calm, splendidly engineered harbor. When a foreign sovereign visited, the Egyptian fleet headed out to meet him; it surely did so in full force now. No matter how she had advertised her errand at home, no matter what her actual agenda abroad, Cleopatra could hardly have envisioned this dismal conclusion. She had had a few weeks to come to terms with events and to look ahead; whether she grieved personally or not, she had cause for apprehension. Not only was there no one to intervene on her behalf in Rome, but she had now inserted herself dangerously into the blood sport that was that city’s politics. As Caesar’s only son, Caesarion was her trump card. He was also a potential liability. She was if anything in greater danger than she had been in 48, when first she had found herself caught between two ambitious foreigners fighting to the death.

If Cleopatra knew the irritating nuisance of self-doubt, all evidence has been lost to history. What Plutarch described as her supreme confidence instead survives her, along with her superlative powers of persuasion. On a later occasion she would pass off a mission entirely botched as one expertly accomplished; it is difficult to believe that, having made her fragrant offerings on deck, she descended the gangplank in Alexandria—again a sovereign, safely returned to her admiring subjects—anything less than triumphantly.^* She was free of rustic Rome, delivered from the swells of the waves and the turbulence abroad to a land that recognized her as a living goddess, every bit Venus’s equal, returned to a city where monarchy received its proper due, where a queen could hold her head high without being flailed for arrogance, where no one yelped over golden chairs or shuddered at the sight of diadems. She was, in short, back in civilization. That was particularly evident over an Egyptian summer, the season of celebrations. In its festivals too Cleopatra’s kingdom inverted the Roman order. With the fields under water, Egypt devoted itself to song, dance, and feasting. “Home is best,” went the Greek adage, and so it must have felt to Cleopatra, returning from a land that defined the word differently. “Alexandria,” Cicero had railed years earlier, “is home of all deceit and falsehood.”

It is unclear who managed Egyptian affairs while Cleopatra was abroad—normally she would have entrusted matters to her minister of finance—but whoever he was he did so expertly. She returned to a kingdom that was prosperous and at peace, no small order given her absence or absences. There are no extant protests concerning tax collection, no evidence of the kind of revolt that had greeted her father’s return. The temples continued to flourish. Cleopatra slipped smoothly back into her role. The disturbing news came from abroad. In her exile, Arsinoe, Cleopatra’s younger sister, persisted in her designs on the throne. Reprising her coup of four years earlier, Arsinoe marshaled enough support in Ephesus to have herself proclaimed queen of Egypt. Her feat speaks both to her tenacity and to the fragility of Cleopatra’s position outside her country. The Temple of Artemis was filled with priceless treasure; Arsinoe appears to have had Roman backers as well as a family, or a faux-family, accomplice. At about this time a pretender materialized, claiming to be Ptolemy XIII, miraculously resuscitated after his Nile drowning of three years earlier. Certainly the two sisters despised each other. Arsinoe may have gone so far as to have suborned Cleopatra’s commander in Cyprus, whose loyalties wavered. It was an easy trip from Cyprus to Ephesus; the Cyprus commander was traditionally a high-ranking official. To complicate matters, Cleopatra had another brother at her side, the expendable and possibly disloyal Ptolemy XIV. “There’s a common proverb scolding people who trip twice over the same stone,” Cicero had observed, and Cleopatra—vulnerable again on two fronts—was not prone to clumsiness. At some point over the summer she arranged for the murder of Ptolemy XIV, allegedly by poison.^*

Whether the fifteen-year-old had been in league with their exiled sister or not, he was clearly unnecessary, an insult to Cleopatra’s autonomy. His murder allowed her to proclaim Caesarion her co-regent, which she did that summer. At some point after July—a newly eponymous month that occurred in 44 for the first time, to much gnashing of teeth at Cicero’s address—Caesarion was named pharaoh. With his ascension began the third of Cleopatra’s co-regencies. Hers was an original solution, also an ideal one. Caesarion became “King Ptolemy, who is as well Caesar, Father-loving, Mother-loving God.” Cleopatra had her obligatory male consort. A Roman, and a doubly divine one, sat on the Egyptian throne. And a three-year-old was unlikely to meddle in any way with his mother’s agenda.

Not only was hers a brilliant strategic calculation—Cleopatra symbolically swathed Egypt in Caesar’s mantle, for which she could see a violent contest brewing—it was also a deft iconographical one. If Caesar had returned from Alexandria more royal than before, Cleopatra returned from Rome more godly. She vigorously embraced her role as Isis, with full emphasis on her maternal command, a novel instance of coaxing a promotion from childbearing. At festivals she appeared in her striking Isis attire. Recent events provided a powerful assist; Caesar’s assassination may have destroyed Cleopatra’s years of meticulous planning but represented a boon to the imagery. In the legend, the enemies of Osiris, Isis’s earthly partner and the supreme male divinity, savagely dismember him. Osiris leaves behind a young male heir and a devoted, quick-thinking consort. In Isis’s grief, she collects the butchered pieces, to effect his resurrection. The Ides of March handily buttressed the tale; Cleopatra emerged stronger for her loss, the great wife of a martyred deity. It did not hurt that in Rome on the first day of 42 Caesar was—in a solemn religious ceremony—declared a god.

Publicly Cleopatra played up the role of Isis as provider of wisdom and of material and spiritual sustenance, advertising Caesarion’s presence, the family trinity, and the spiritual rebirth.^* She embarked on an ambitious building program, in much of which she exploited the myth. Caesarion survives in relief on the walls of the Temple of Dendera, a vast project Cleopatra’s father had inherited. Possibly to celebrate her son’s ascension, Cleopatra had him carved, with the crowns of Upper and Lower Egypt, standing before her, offering incense to Isis, Horus, Osiris. It was an effective conflation of themes; she follows him as both pharaoh and mother, in one depiction shaking an Isis rattle and wearing the goddess’s traditional double-crown headdress. Her name takes precedence in the caption below; she likely inaugurated the carvings. She completed work her father had begun at Edfu, in Upper Egypt, to which she probably transferred the teams of Dendera workmen. She established a boat shrine at Koptos, farther north; and built a small sanctuary celebrating the births of divine children behind the main temple at Hermonthis, near Luxor. Caesarion is closely associated there with Horus, who—perhaps not incidentally—is to avenge the death of his father. Cleopatra may already have begun a massive structure dedicated to Caesar and known later as the Caesareum, above the Alexandrian harbor. It would ultimately constitute a precinct unto itself, of porticoes, libraries, chambers, groves, gateways, broadwalks, and courts, fitted with exquisite art. Her largest project was a temple of Isis in Alexandria, entirely lost today.

On other fronts as well she was in the resurrection business. Under Cleopatra, Alexandria enjoyed a robust intellectual revival. Gathering a coterie of thinkers around her, Cleopatra reconstituted a Greek intelligentsia in the city, to which she had no difficulty luring scholars. Among her intimates she counted Philostratus, an orator celebrated for his spellbinding, extemporaneous performances. He may also have been her personal tutor. The only indigenous school of philosophy emerged under Cleopatra; a skeptic, Aenesidemus of Knossos, wrangled with the relativity of human perceptions and the impossibility of knowledge. Scholarly work in grammar and history enjoyed a renaissance, although the revival generated few of the dizzyingly original theoretical leaps of previous centuries. Medicine and pharmacology represented the sole exceptions. Doctors had long been attached to the Ptolemaic court, where they were influential, public-spirited statesmen, and where in Cleopatra’s reign the most eminent men in their fields wrote prolifically, on medicine and maladies, on eye and lung ailments, both as scholars and practitioners. In surgery particularly these thinkers made bold strides, producing a new body of specialized skills. The work was otherwise derivative, prone to sterility, given more to classification than to creativity. To it came the first native Alexandrian scholars. Four years Cleopatra’s junior and the son of a local saltfish seller, Didymus distinguished himself at court for his lively wit and his prodigious output. He discoursed perceptively on the lexicon, on Homer, on Demosthenes, on history, drama, and poetry. In several volumes he lobbed some satirical shots even at Cicero. It is a wonder he had time for his sovereign; maniacally productive, Didymus turned out more than 3,500 treatises and commentaries, which may explain why he could not remember what he had written and stood regularly accused of contradicting himself. These were the men with whom Cleopatra dined, with whom she lived in close contact and discussed affairs of state. The household thinker served as “intellectual stimulus or as confessor and conscience.” He was at once mentor and servant.

Collectively the early 40s are the years that prove Cleopatra to have been far more than the sum of her supposed seductions. She made her first steps toward restoring Ptolemaic glory, again following her father’s lead, though with more quantifiable results. She supported and engaged with intellectual endeavors, as befitted her heritage. Hellenistic sovereigns were by definition cultural patrons and scholars; among Cleopatra’s forebears were plenty of murderers, also a historian, a zoologist, a playwright. Ptolemy I wrote a much-admired account of Alexander the Great. Reading backward, we are left to gauge Cleopatra’s reputation by what was falsely attributed to her. She has received extracurricular credit for a diverse body of literature, which says something of her profile. A decadent abroad, she was an able-bodied intellectual at home. She has been variously cited as an authority on magic and medicine, inseparable still for some time; on hairdressing; on cosmetics; on weights and measures. These were realms Cleopatra may well have explored, at least at the dinner table. As for medicine, she was a great patron of the Temple of Hathor, devoted to female health. She was all the same only slightly more likely to have written about baths of asses’ milk than to have invented aspirin.

A curious cure for baldness would be credited to Cleopatra; she was said to counsel a paste of equal parts burnt mice, burnt rag, burnt horses’ teeth, bear’s grease, deer marrow, and reed bark. Mixed with honey, the salve was to be applied to the scalp, “rubbed until it sprouts.” Plutarch holds that she concocted “all sorts of deadly poisons,” with which she experimented on prisoners. “When she saw that the speedy poisons enhanced the sharpness of death by the pain they caused,” she moved on to a survey of venomous animals. These she studied systematically, daily “watching with her own eyes as they were set one upon another.” The Talmud hails her for her “great scientific curiosity” and as “very interested in the experiments of doctors and surgeons.” Given the preponderance of medical professionals at court, the progress in the field, and the lively interest demonstrated in the natural sciences by other Eastern kings—many of whom performed experiments and wrote on biology and botany—this was likely true. The rest of the Talmudic passage may be less so. It attributes to Cleopatra a set of experiments on female prisoners, “in order to determine at what point the fetus became an actual embryo.” Similarly, the medieval Gynaecia Cleopatrae is doubtless apocryphal. It includes instructions for a vaginal suppository “that I always used, and my sister Arsinoe tried.” Leaving aside the question as to whether Cleopatra and her usurping younger sister are likely to have traded contraceptive tips over years when they were more likely plotting each other’s murder, the text is problematic for having been written in Latin. Cleopatra was rumored to be especially skilled in the occult sciences, though the only alchemy she worked was in turning the fields of Egypt into gold.

Much of Cleopatra’s supposed scholarship derives from the Arab world, where Roman propaganda did not penetrate. There she established herself as a philosopher, physician, scientist, scholar. Her name was powerfully resonant, the more so for her association with the pharmacologically inclined, miracle-working Isis. As credible as were some of the imputations, it is difficult to determine how many of the accomplishments were genuine; how many the flattering fallout of Plutarch’s account of an intellectually inclined woman, comfortable in the company of philosophers and physicians, living in enlightened times; and how much they constitute the usual assault on the composed, capable woman, suspect for being too good at her craft, whose talents can be attributed only to “magic arts and charms.” Dissected or not, the bodies must be buried somewhere, the cauldrons and the books of spells nearby. Cleopatra’s abilities were great, but the fertile male fancy incontestably greater.

Her competence would be put to the test in the years following the return, when disaster followed upon disaster. The Nile did not stir over the spring of 43, and that summer failed to rise at all. It proved equally uncooperative the following year. Crops failed to a degree that defied the historical record. Throughout Egypt the misery was acute. Cleopatra eventlessly steered her kingdom through the sustained crisis, doubtless careful about tripping over familiar stones; the previous famine had been a fiasco for her. She may again have declared a state of emergency. Her people were starving. She had little choice but to open the royal granaries and distribute free wheat.^* Inflation raged; Cleopatra further devalued the currency. Petitioners from two districts appeared before her for relief from venal tax collectors. Given the “general malaise” and “inspired by a hatred of evil,” she granted them exemptions. She posted notices of the amnesty widely. In the midst of the agricultural crisis came reports of odd glandular swellings and nasty black pustules; an epidemic raged either in Egypt or just beyond its borders. The prolific Dioscorides, an expert on medicinal plants, had ample material on which to base a pioneering treatise on bubonic plague.

The timing was particularly inauspicious as the Roman civil war returned violently in 43 to Egypt’s shores. The Italian peninsula could hardly contain that conflict, a brutal, fitful demonstration that, in Plutarch’s words, “No wild beast is more savage than man when his passion is supplemented by power.” For Cleopatra the infighting took the form of a sort of perverse fairy tale: She knew that all parties would come calling. (The number of appeals attests to her sustained wealth.) She also knew that to back the wrong party was to invite disaster. While she remained answerable to Rome, it was difficult to do so when she did not know who, precisely, Rome was. And no matter whom she endorsed, the cost was likely to be exorbitant. Already she was well acquainted with the wisdom offered to her father, bluntly apprised in the midst of his negotiations as to “what humiliations and troubles he would run himself into; what bribery he must resort to; and what cupidity he would have to satisfy when he came to the leading men at Rome, whom all Egypt turned into silver would scarcely content.”

Cleopatra’s best option would have been to do nothing, an option she quickly exhausted. She went finally with her natural sympathies, and at her price. Dolabella had been high in Caesar’s favor, his precocious fleet commander, his first choice for consul in 44. He was dissolute and hot-headed, also robust, a fine speaker, and a popular favorite. Still in his twenties, he may have struck Cleopatra as Caesar’s natural political heir. When Dolabella applied for assistance, Cleopatra sent him the four legions Caesar had left her, along with a fleet. In exchange she secured a promise that Caesarion would be recognized as king of Egypt, a confirmation crucial to her. Unfortunately, her fleet was intercepted on the high seas. Without a struggle it defected to Cassius, Dolabella’s rival and a leader among the assassins. In turn Cassius prevailed upon Cleopatra for assistance. She sent her excuses. Famine and plague ravaged her country. She was utterly without resources. Simultaneously she prepared a second expedition for Dolabella. Foul winds confined that fleet to the harbor. And she met with rebellious subordinates. Her military commander in Cyprus countermanded her order, supplying Cassius with Egyptian ships. Cleopatra would be called upon to answer for his defiance later.

She was playing a dangerous game that only became more so. In July 43 Cassius’s army encircled and crushed Dolabella, who committed suicide. If she had not already done so, Cleopatra heard next from Cassius’s enemies, Octavian and Antony. The two were in league at the end of 43, intent on revenge against the assassins, primarily led by Brutus and Cassius. For Octavian, Caesar’s adopted son and his former counsel, Cleopatra readied a powerful fleet, loaded down with materiel. She intended to deliver it personally to Greece. Meanwhile the assassin Cassius menaced her. She refused to rise to the bait. He threatened again. He had asked only for her cooperation; Cleopatra had instead assisted his enemy. She was by no means proving the obedient female Caesar had advertised. Enraged, Cassius prepared a full-scale Egyptian invasion. The timing was right; Egypt was weak with famine, Cleopatra vulnerable in the absence of her Roman legions. She later insisted that “she had not been terrified of Cassius,” but she would have been foolish not to have been. He was a noxious character, composed of equal parts cruelty and greed. Known as “the most aggressive of men,” he had been a prime mover among the assassins. He had twelve first-rate legions at his command, as well as an expert force of mounted bowmen. He had been pitiless with those cities into which he had already marched. A skilled general and a former Pompeian admiral, he had fought in the East before. And he was already close at hand, across the Egyptian border, where he had seized control of Syria.

Yet again Cleopatra was spared in the nick of time by competing Roman interests. As he began his march toward Egypt, Cassius was diverted by an urgent summons. Antony and Octavian had crossed the Adriatic. They traveled east to challenge him. Cassius hesitated. Egypt was a rich prize, within easy reach. Sternly, Brutus reminded him that he was not meant to win power for himself, but liberty for his country. The disappointed Cassius reversed direction, to join Brutus in Greece. For Cleopatra the reprieve coincided with unhappy events. She had headed out with her fleet, to join Antony and Octavian. She herself commanded the flagship. Yet again foul weather intervened. In its face a high, square-rigged warship was useless, quickly swamped, easily overturned. She returned to Alexandria with a battered remnant of a navy. As she explained later, the storm “not only ruined everything but also caused her to fall ill, for which reason she had not put to sea even afterwards.” Some have questioned her sincerity, giving Cleopatra’s story a suspect I-didn’t-want-to-get-my-heels-wet spin. (It is notable that when she is not condemned for being too bold and masculine, Cleopatra is taken to task for being unduly frail and feminine.) She appears to have been true to her word, however. She knew she could not deny assistance to those actively avenging her lover’s death. And a Cassius ally who lay in wait to ambush Cleopatra’s fleet—with a fleet of sixty decked ships, a legion of Cassius’s men, and a stockpile of flaming arrows—both heard of the disaster and came across Egyptian wreckage floating off the coast of southern Greece. Cleopatra limped home in ill health. For her careful and costly efforts she had secured the allegiance of no one.

Having offered the victors no effective assistance, Cleopatra knew she would be held to account soon enough. An emissary arrived in Alexandria more or less on cue, probably early in 41. He was a suave and tart-tongued negotiator, also a man of acrobatic loyalties. Already Quintus Dellius had changed sides three times in the course of the civil war, having leapt from Dolabella’s camp to Cassius’s, to touch down, temporarily, in Mark Antony’s. He had come to Alexandria to exact some answers from the oddly uncooperative queen of Egypt. Why had she collaborated with Cassius? How to explain her tepid support of the Caesarians? Where precisely were her loyalties? Presumably Dellius had been briefed on the wonders of Alexandria and its jewel-encrusted palace. Whatever he had heard failed to prepare him adequately for Cleopatra. He “had no sooner seen her face, and remarked her adroitness and subtlety in speech” than he realized he would need to reassess his approach. On Cleopatra’s disarming effect all sources unanimously, even actively, agree. Plutarch so much falls under her posthumous spell that—from the moment of Dellius’s arrival—he essentially lets her run off with Mark Antony’s narrative.

Dellius quickly grasped that he would not be delivering up a sorry, subdued queen for arraignment. The woman before him was not the kind who could be asked to explain herself. Opportunist that he was, he may have seen that something else could be made of the situation. He was himself highly susceptible to beauty. From their lusty escapades together, he knew well the tastes of his commanding officer. Dellius either melted in Cleopatra’s hands, realized Antony would, or both. Fortunately the flip side of his inconstancy was a nearly double-jointed agility; he executed an effortless about-face. He flattered and fawned, so much so that it is unclear whose agenda he ultimately advanced. His advice was—Dellius deserves long overdue points for stage management—to engage in a little playacting. Cleopatra was to put on her finest clothes. Her situation was analogous to that of Hera in the Iliad, who kneads her skin to a soft glow, anoints herself with enticing oils, braids her bright tresses, wraps herself in ambrosial robes, cinches her waist with tassels, and—gold brooches at her breast and gems dangling from her ears—strides off to meet Zeus. Cleopatra was to come abroad with him posthaste. She had, Dellius assured her, nothing to fear. Mark Antony was “the gentlest and kindest of soldiers.”

THREE YEARS EARLIER, as Cleopatra had hurried from Rome under a dull April sky, she crossed paths with another wary traveler. Though he did so as a private citizen, Octavian had made his way to Rome “accompanied by a remarkable crowd which increased every day like a torrent” and borne along by a current of goodwill. Either at the time or in the retelling, he was greeted by the ancient equivalent of special effects. As he neared the Appian Way, the fog lifted and “a great halo with the colours of the rainbow surrounded the whole sun,” which had not been seen for weeks. Caesar’s heir was as unknown to his followers as they were to him; they flocked to his side—none more enthusiastically than the veterans of Caesar’s campaigns—with the expectation that the eighteen-year-old would avenge “the butchery in the Senate.” He was noncommittal on that front, proceeding, on his mother’s advice, “craftily and patiently,” at least until he set foot on Antony’s property. The sallow, provincial teenager with the curly blond hair and the eyebrows that joined above his nose had hardly distinguished himself. He had spent little time in Rome. He had neither military experience nor political authority. His constitution was frail, his figure unprepossessing. He had arrived to claim the most coveted inheritance of the age, the name of his granduncle.

Bright and early the next morning Octavian presented himself at the Forum to accept Caesar’s adoption. He proceeded to call on Mark Antony, in the garden of his fine estate, to which Octavian was admitted only after a lengthy, humiliating delay. No matter how he announced himself—already his followers called him Caesar—the call would have rankled. If for Cleopatra Octavian’s appearance in Rome was uncomfortable, it was for Mark Antony an insult. A strained conversation followed between two men—or in the forty-year-old Antony’s opinion, a man and a boy—who felt they had equal right to Caesar’s legacy. Octavian was precise and deliberative, later something of a control freak; he no doubt practiced his remarks in advance. (Even when speaking to his wife he preferred to write out his thoughts and read them aloud.) Certainly Octavian delivered those in 44 with chilling confidence and candor. Why had Antony failed to prosecute the assassins? (For the sake of order, everyone had urged an amnesty. Antony had presided over the Senate when it was granted, however.) The prime movers were not only alive, but had been rewarded with provincial governorships and military commands. Octavian entreated his elder “to stand behind me and help me take revenge on the murderers.” If he could not, would he please step respectfully aside? After all, Antony might just as well have been Caesar’s political heir had he conducted himself more prudently. As for the inheritance, could Antony kindly hand over the gold Caesar had left, for the promised distributions? Octavian added that Antony could keep “the valuables and other finery,” less an invitation than an accusation.

Mark Antony was more than twice Octavian’s age. He had “all the prestige of his long service with Caesar.” Over the previous two years he had exercised great, if not always decorous, authority. He had moreover already liquidated Octavian’s inheritance, as he had earlier made a shambles of Pompey’s former home, liberally bestowing magnificent tapestries and furniture on friends. He did not need to be reminded that he had narrowly missed out on adoption by the man he too admired above all others. Nor did he need to be lectured by a diminutive, self-righteous upstart. He was much taken aback. In his rich, raspy voice, he reminded the young man before him that political leadership in Rome was not hereditary. Comporting himself as if it were had got Caesar murdered. Antony had run plenty of risks to ensure that Caesar was buried with honors, plenty more for the sake of his memory. It was entirely thanks to him, he testily informed Octavian, “that you in fact possess all the distinctions of Caesar’s that you do—family, name, rank and wealth.” Antony owed no explanations. He deserved gratitude rather than blame. Unable to resist, as he often was, Antony added a little poison dart to his message, upbraiding the stripling for his disrespect, “and you a young man and I your senior.” Octavian was moreover mistaken if he believed Antony coveted political power or resented the newcomer’s position. “Descent from Hercules is quite good enough for me,” huffed Antony, who—broad-shouldered, bull-necked, ridiculously handsome, with a thick head of curls and aquiline features—entirely looked the part. As for money, there was none in his hands. Octavian’s brilliant father had left the treasury quite empty.

Explosive though it was, that interview came as a relief to the Senate, to which there was only one danger greater than a public feud between the two Caesarians. Antony wielded political power. Octavian was respected, and surprisingly popular. Enthusiastic demonstrations greeted him throughout his travels. Far better that the two rivals obstruct each other, went the thinking, than that they join forces. Antony noted as much in his garden that spring morning. Octavian was fresh from his studies. Certainly in the course of them he had learned that the populace considered it their business to prolong discord, that they built up demagogues for the pleasure of knocking them down, that they encouraged them to destroy each other. He was of course right. And no one was better at fomenting dissension than Cicero, who could always be counted on, as a contemporary put it, to malign the prominent, blackmail the powerful, slander the distinguished. He now gamely obliged.

To Cicero the contest was a baneful one between weakness and villainy. In truth there were a dizzying number of options. Among Caesar’s assassins, Brutus and Cassius remained very much in the picture. A bold young man with a gift for assembling armies, Pompey’s son was in Spain with the greater part of the Roman navy. Sextus Pompey had on his side his own father’s still-bright reputation; he, too, was looking to avenge a parent and recover an inheritance. (He arguably had a greater claim on vengeance. As an adolescent, he had witnessed his father’s beheading off the coast of Egypt.) The consul Marcus Aemilius Lepidus, having succeeded Antony as Caesar’s second in command, having dined with Caesar the night before his murder, dreamed too of succeeding Caesar. He controlled a faction of Caesar’s army. Additional legions reported to additional consuls. Brutus had unexpectedly raised his army in record time.^* It seemed that Octavian alone was without a command.

The most influential man in Rome after the Ides, Cicero found himself in much the same bind as Cleopatra. Which side to join? He could see that neutrality would on this occasion—the fifth civil war of his lifetime—not be possible. At the same time, he knew all the parties in question and was enchanted by none. In 44 Octavian struck him as a mere schoolboy, a nuisance rather than a prospect. “I don’t trust his age and I don’t know what he’s after,” Cicero carped. It was difficult to imagine Octavian—a pale-faced teenager in a city that preferred its complexions ruddy—as a commander in chief. He proferred himself as leader, and yet was so naïve as to believe that Rome could keep a secret! (It is interesting that few deigned to take Octavian seriously at eighteen, at which age Cleopatra already ruled Egypt.)

By May 44, when Cicero felt Rome no longer safe for him, he settled on Dolabella, though with a wrinkle. That dashing commander had for four years been his son-in-law. Dolabella and Cicero’s daughter had divorced during her pregnancy; Dolabella had subsequently been slow to repay the dowry, as he was obliged to do. Once an ardent Caesarian, Dolabella turned after the Ides against his former benefactor. He pretended even to have been party to the conspiracy, which he publicly approved. Cicero cheered loudly from the sidelines. As of May 1 his former son-in-law was “my wonderful Dolabella.” Stocky, long-haired Dolabella delivered a star performance of a speech. Cicero slobbered in admiration. Dolabella had so eloquently defended the assassins that Brutus could practically wear a crown himself! Surely, Cicero assured him, Dolabella knew already of his deep regard? (More likely, Dolabella knew of just the opposite.) Dolabella destroyed a makeshift column, raised to Caesar’s memory. He suppressed pro-Caesarian demonstrations. Cicero’s esteem only grew. “No affection was ever more ardent,” he effused. The Republic rested on Dolabella’s shoulders.

A week later Cicero was through with his former son-in-law. “The gall of the man!” he spat, declaring himself a bitter enemy. What had happened in the interim? Despite the fusillade of compliments, Dolabella had neglected to make good on his debt. There was a moment of reprieve; Cicero could not help but repeatedly congratulate Dolabella for a brilliant tirade against Antony, long the way to Cicero’s heart. On that count too, personal animosities trumped political issues. Trusted associates of Caesar both, Dolabella and Mark Antony had for several years been at odds following a certain indiscretion on the part of Antony’s then wife. (For the same reason, she abruptly became his ex-wife.) Sometimes it indeed seemed as if there were only ten women in Rome. And in Cicero’s view, Mark Antony had slept with every one of them.

Politics have long been defined as “the systematic organization of hatreds.” Certainly nothing better described Rome in the years following the Ides, when enmity rather than issues divided Caesar’s assassins, Caesar’s heirs, and the last of the Pompeians, each of whom, it seemed, had an army, an agenda, and ambitions of his own. Among the bumper crop of personal vendettas, none was more savage than that of Cicero and Mark Antony. The bad blood went back decades. Antony’s father had died when he was ten, leaving so many debts that Antony had declined his inheritance. His stepfather, a celebrated orator, had been sentenced to death on Cicero’s orders. From his father, Mark Antony inherited a joyful, capricious temperament. He was given to sulks and sprees. His mother—by all accounts a force of nature—appeared to have fostered in her reckless son a taste for competent, strong-minded women. Without them Antony arguably would have self-destructed well before March 44. Already his personal life was something of a catastrophe. He cemented the family reputation for insolvency while still in his teens. His sterling military reputation was eclipsed only by his fame as a reveler; he left tutors half-dead in his carousing wake. He was given to good living, great parties, bad women. He was generous to a fault, always easier when the house you are rashly giving away is not yours in the first place. What was said of an earlier tribune was more true of Antony: “He was a spendthrift of money and chastity—his own and other people’s.” The brilliant cavalry officer had all of Caesar’s charm and none of his self-control. In 44 the conspirators had deemed him too inconsistent to be dangerous.

After the Ides Mark Antony was in his glory, entirely the man of the hour—at least until Octavian arrived. Cleopatra was not yet reinstalled in Alexandria when the first tensions were felt. They were entirely public: “All over the city,” Appian relates, “Octavian would climb up on to any elevated spot and accuse Antony at the top of his voice.” Antony might treat him with as much indignity as he liked, he might condemn him to a life of poverty, thundered Octavian, but would he please “stop plundering his property until the citizens have had their legacy?” He could then take all the rest. Antony hotly bellowed back. He was insulting and obstructionist wherever possible. The Senate did nothing to discourage either man, preferring instead, as Dio has it and as Antony had predicted, “to set them at odds with each other.” Antony’s men urged reconciliation, all the more crucial as the assassins consolidated their forces. Antony apologized. He promised to control his temper provided that Octavian did the same. One uneasy truce followed another. Antony broke the second with a sensational charge: in October he accused Octavian of bribing Antony’s bodyguards to murder him. (In truth Octavian had only tried to bribe them to defect, a practice of which he would make a regular habit. As for Mark Antony’s safety, Octavian offered personally to stand guard at his bedside.) Most believed the charge preposterous. Some did not, which left Octavian apoplectic. On one occasion he was reduced to pummeling the locked door of Mark Antony’s house in an attempt to clear his name, wildly shouting oath after oath at the servants and at a plank of wood.

Courted assiduously by Octavian, who wrote to him daily, Cicero played for time. It was a delicate business. Were Octavian to come to power, the assassins were lost. Moreover, Octavian was at once alarmingly impressionable and curiously resistant to advice from his elders. Cicero had particular difficulty with the young man’s florid encomiums of Caesar. “On the other hand,” Cicero reasoned, “if he is beaten, you can see that Antony will be intolerable, so one can’t tell which to prefer.” Antony was bent on plunder, Octavian blinded by vengeance. Cicero hemmed and hawed, fixing finally on one certainty, which he repeated like a mantra: “The man who crushes Mark Antony will have finished this ghastly and perilous war.” By the fall of 44, defending the commonwealth, or what remained of it, became to Cicero synonymous with mauling Antony, against whom he fulminated for the next six months. It was in the course of those harrowing weeks that Cleopatra found herself entangled with Antony and Octavian’s real enemies, collaborating as she was, ingenuously and disingenuously, with Dolabella and Cassius.

In the rabid attacks we know as the Philippics Cicero set out to destroy Caesar’s former lieutenant. Antony was at best “an audacious rascal,” at worst an erratic, drunken, filthy, shameless, depraved, licentious, pillaging madman. “In truth,” asserted Cicero, “we ought not to think of him as a human being, but as a most outrageous beast.” Certainly Antony gave Cicero plenty to work with. He had mismanaged funds. He had indulged in scandalous affairs. He had appropriated property. He had made a spectacle of himself, at one point allegedly attaching lions to a chariot for a joyride through Rome. Excess and conviviality were his middle names. His colorful stunts accounted in large part for his popularity; to his men he was irresistible. There had been ample carousing, even if “the fume of debauch” did not attach itself to Antony quite as tenaciously as Cicero insisted. He was all the same happy to retail and amplify tales of Antony’s indignities. The morning he had opened his mouth to speak in the Senate and instead vomited the putrid remains of a wedding feast into his lap was not one Cicero would ever let him forget. Antony was henceforth “the belching, vomiting brute,” prone to “spewing rather than speaking.” He had no ambition beyond providing for Rome’s actors, gamblers, pimps. On this subject Cicero was inexhaustible. As he had admitted long before: “It is easy to inveigh against profligacy; daylight would soon fail me if I were to endeavour to expose everything which could be said upon that topic: seduction, adultery, wantonness, extravagance, the topic is illimitable.”^* So he proved on the subject of Mark Antony.

As the abuse continued, two new themes emerged. Octavian inevitably went from being “the boy” to “my young friend” to “this extraordinary youngster” to “that heaven-sent young man,” on whom Rome’s hopes rested. Also as Cicero ranted, Antony gained a partner in crime. Summoning every speck of evidence, rumor, and innuendo, Cicero included Fulvia, Antony’s wife of three years, in his rabid denunciations. Fulvia had participated equally in doling out appointments, auctioning off provinces, embezzling state funds, asserted Cicero. He indicted her for her greed, her ambition, her cruelty, her guile. He charged Antony with the worst crime that could be leveled against Caesar’s former lieutenant: Mark Antony, he bellowed, “would prefer to answer to a most audacious woman than the Senate and Roman people.” With his have-you-no-decency offensive Cicero settled an invaluable inheritance on Octavian, who would avail himself of each and every line, without once crediting the best ghostwriter in history.

BY NOVEMBER 43 Octavian and Antony had little choice but to join forces. It was that winter that Brutus and Cassius united in the eastern Aegean, Cassius having relinquished his expedition against Cleopatra. The assassins were well armed and well funded; bowing to necessity, Antony and Octavian swallowed their mutual disdain and submitted to a formal alliance. In it they included Lepidus, who commanded a particularly spirited army. Late in the month the three came together on a small island in the midst of present-day Bologna, “to exchange enmity for friendship.” They frisked one another for concealed daggers and sat down to talk, in full view of their armies. There they remained for two days of dawn-to-dusk discussions, unsurprising given the conflicting agendas. As the Roman historian Florus put it much later: “Lepidus was actuated by a desire for wealth, which he might expect to gain from confusion in the State; Antony desired vengeance upon those who had declared him an enemy; Caesar [Octavian] was spurred on by the thought that his father’s death was still unpunished and that the survival of Cassius and Brutus was an insult to his departed spirit.” At the end of two days the three nonetheless hammered out an agreement, essentially appointing themselves dictators for five years and carving up the empire among them. Each man swore to uphold the terms and joined hands. On the mainland, their exultant armies saluted one another. The agreement—to be known later as the Second Triumvirate—was to take effect as of January 42. Cleopatra could only have been relieved. Together Octavian and Antony had a chance. She was in no position to head off the combined forces of Brutus and Cassius, who would show no mercy to an ally of Caesar’s, less so to one who ruled with his child.

The new triumvirs addressed as well the pressing question of finances. The money was all in Asia, where it streamed freely into the assassins’ coffers. In Rome the treasury remained empty. That state of affairs led inevitably to the sticky subject of personal enemies. The three men withdrew to compile a list in private. There was some high-level horse trading as they offered up “their staunchest friends in return for their bitterest enemies.” In such a way Antony sacrificed a much-loved uncle for Cicero. Lepidus threw over a brother. Your chances of survival were especially poor if you had funds at your disposal. “Extra names were constantly added to the list, some from enmity, others only because they had been a nuisance, or were friends of enemies, or enemies of friends, or were notably wealthy,” Appian tells us. Separately the triumvirs hastened with their men to Rome, where they presided over a season of bloodletting. “The whole city,” notes Dio, “filled with corpses,” often left in the street to be devoured by dogs and birds, or cast into the river. Some of the proscribed descended for safety into wells or filthy sewers. Others took refuge in chimneys.^*

Having abandoned various plans for escape, Cicero was at his country villa, south of Rome, on December 7, 43. He had lain down for a rest when a crow flew in the window and began to peck at the bedcovers. His servants read this as a sign of impending danger; they begged Cicero to allow them to carry him to the sea. He would be well hidden in the dense wood along the way. Reluctantly he climbed into his litter, a copy of Euripides in his hand. Minutes later a centurion broke down the door of his villa. Exacting the information he needed, he ran ahead to intercept the litter on the path. Cicero ordered his terrified servants to set him down among the trees; he wanted to look his murderer in the eye. The great man was unkempt and haggard, “his face wasted with anxiety.” Drawing the curtain fully open, he stretched his neck out as far as he could, so that it might be cut properly. He suspected that he was in the hands of an amateur, as indeed he was. With some inexpert sawing, Cicero’s head was severed from his body. By Antony’s prior command the hands that had penned the Philippics were hacked off as well, to be sent from the seaside for display in the Senate. It was said that Fulvia—a longtime enemy of Cicero’s for her own reasons—first spit on the head, forcing open the mouth and piercing the tongue with a hairpin. In the end two thousand prominent Romans lay dead, including nearly a third of the Senate. The triumvirs found themselves unopposed in Rome, at the command of forty-three legions, and broke, the proscriptions having proved less profitable than anticipated.

Ten months later the armies of Cassius and Brutus met those of Antony and Octavian near Philippi, on a broad plain in eastern Macedonia. Two battles ensued, of unprecedented scale and dire import. One side offered to lead Rome toward autocracy. The other fought still for a republic. All was complicated by the fact that the forces were well seasoned and similarly trained; it was difficult for either to achieve supremacy over an enemy that spoke the same language, shared the same tactics, and had submitted to identical training. The two armies of more than 100,000 men met in fierce, face-to-face combat, amid choking clouds of dust, with drawn swords and bare hands, over the crash of shields, shouts of exhaustion and terrible groans, and, ultimately, with horrific casualties on both sides. Only after a second engagement did Octavian and Antony—their men on the brink of starvation—prevail over the Republicans. Cassius committed suicide, dispatching himself with the same dagger he had sunk into Caesar. Brutus threw himself upon his sword. The victors approached his corpse differently. Antony removed his expensive purple cloak and laid it carefully over the body, to be buried with his brilliant former colleague. Shortly thereafter Octavian arrived on the scene. He ordered Brutus’s head severed from the body and displayed in Rome.^*

Philippi was still a battle of ideas; in its wake, liberty and democracy could be said to have fallen, Caesar’s death to have been avenged. Antony now shaved the beard he had grown in mourning. No issue divided Mark Antony and Octavian, who would have to invent one; they were two men in search of a conflict. Across the Mediterranean, Cleopatra—managing domestic crises of her own—would have been within her rights to wonder why the Romans did not subscribe to the tidier monarchical model, given the bloodshed their personal ambitions had over the previous years cost them. As Dio observed later, democracy sounded very well and good, “but its results are seen not to agree at all with its title. Monarchy, on the contrary, has an unpleasant sound, but is a most practical form of government to live under. For it is easier to find a single excellent man than many of them.”

Again in 42 Antony and Octavian divided the Mediterranean world between them, this time shunting Lepidus aside. With signed agreements in hand they parted ways. Antony emerged in his glory, very much the senior member of the partnership. The military victory had been his; he took from Philippi a reputation for invincibility, one that would inspire terror for years to come. He headed east, to restore order and raise funds. Octavian had spent the better part of the month sick, carted about the battle site on a litter. He headed west to regain his health. He was to demobilize the army and distribute lands to the veterans, paid only at the end of a campaign. The world was now in the hands of two men who got on as well as any with diametrically opposed interests and radically different dispositions, one of them ruthless, calculating, patient, the other sentimental, simple, impulsive, which is to say that civil war would rage for the rest of Cleopatra’s lifetime. Had it not, we are unlikely ever to have heard of the last queen of Egypt, who stepped into a role that—in part thanks to Cicero—seemed scripted for her in advance.