Cleopatra: A Life

CHAPTER IV: THE GOLDEN AGE NEVER WAS THE PRESENT AGE

Cicero, Pliny, and Plutarch are the invaluable guides to Rome and the Romans. For the trips there I have relied on the wisdoms of Lionel Casson, and especially on Travel in the Ancient World; see also Michel Reddé and Jean-Claude Golvin’s lavishly illustrated Voyages sur la méditerranée romaine (Paris: Actes Sud, 2005). On C in Rome, Erich Gruen’s debunking “Cleopatra in Rome: Facts and Fantasies,” in Myth, History and Culture in Republican Rome, David Braund and Christopher Gill, eds. (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2003); Edmond Van ’t Dack, “La Date de C. Ord. Ptol. 80–83 = BGU VI 1212 et le séjour de Cléopâtre VII à Rome,” Ancient Society 1 (1970): 53–67. Eusebius attests to the inevitable retinue, 183.30, as does Horace, in a different way; he regretted the wealthy woman’s veritable armature of attendants, Satires I.ii. 95–100.

On the administration of Egypt and the Ptolemaic machine, Bagnall and Derow, 1981, 253–255; Bingen, 2007, 156–255; Bowman, 1986; R. A. Hazzard, Imagination of a Monarchy: Studies in Ptolemaic Propaganda (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000); Maehler, 1983; Leon Mooren, La hiérarchie de cour ptolémaïque (Leuven, Belgium: Studia Hellenistica 23, 1977); Mooren, 2000; Dominic Rathbone, “Ptolemaic to Roman Egypt: The Death of the Dirigiste State?,” in Production and Public Powers in Classical Antiquity, Cambridge Philological Society, 26 (2000), 4–54; Geoffrey Rickman, The Corn Supply of Ancient Rome (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980); Michael Rostovtzeff, A Large Estate in Egypt in the Third Century BC (Madison: University of Wisconsin Studies, 1922); Select Papyri: Public Documents, II (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995); Raphael Taubenschlag, The Law of Graeco-Roman Egypt in the Light of the Papyri (Warsaw: Panstwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1955); D. J. Thompson, “Nile Grain Transport under the Ptolemies,” in Trade in the Ancient Economy, Peter Garnsey and others, eds. (London: Chatto & Windus, 1983), 64–75. For a fine, flavorful summary of papyri, ostraca, and inscriptions from C’s reign, see Ricketts, 1980, 114–36.

On Rome and its mores: Cicero, Horace, Juvenal, Martial, Pliny, Strabo. Among modern sources: Balsdon, Life and Leisure in Ancient Rome (London: Bodley Head, 1969); Casson, Everyday Life in Ancient Rome (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998); Florence Dupont’s colorful Daily Life in Ancient Rome (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993); Luc Duret and Jean-Pierre Neraudau, Urbanisme et metamorphoses de la Rome antique (Paris: Belles Lettres, 2001); Otto Kiefer, Sexual Life in Ancient Rome (New York: Dorset Press, 1993); Thomas Wiedemann, Adults and Children in the Roman Empire (London: Routledge, 1989); T. P. Wiseman, Catullus and His World: A Reappraisal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

For CR, Matthias Gelzer, Caesar: Politician and Statesman (Oxford: Blackwell, 1968); Adrian Goldsworthy, Caesar: Life of a Colossus (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006); Christian Meier, Caesar: A Biography (New York: MJF Books, 1982); Stefan Weinstock, Divus Julius (London: Oxford University Press, 1971); Maria Wyke, Caesar: A Life in Western Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); Zwi Yavetz, Julius Caesar and His Public Image (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983).

1. The golden age: Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard’s Almanack (1750).

2. “What excuses”: Euripides, “Andromache,” in The Trojan Women and Other Plays, James Morwood, tr. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 85–87.

3. CR’s silence: Dio, XLII.iii.3. All in Rome assumed CR would perish at the hands of the Egyptians, “as, indeed, they kept hearing was the case.” Cicero in particular was aware of CR’s difficulties extricating himself from Africa.

4. On birthing: Soranos, cited in Rowlandson, 1998, 286–9; Joyce Tyldesley, Daughters of Isis: Women of Ancient Egypt (New York: Viking, 1994), 70–5.

5. “not be prone to anger”: Third-century BC letter, cited in I. M. Plant, ed., Women Writers of Ancient Greece and Rome (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004), 79–80. Given the infant mortality rate, wet nurses were easy to find.

6. paternity: For a neat summary of the case against Caesarion, Balsdon, “Cleopatra: A Study in Politics and Propaganda by Hans Volkmann,” Classical Review 10, no. 1 (March 1960): 68–71. See also Heinen’s 1969 response to J. Carcopino’s 1937 repudiation of Caesarion, reprinted in Heinen, 2009, 154–75. Here as elsewhere the ancient sources are less than helpful: Suetonius both doubts the paternity and notes that CR allowed the child to be named for him, DJ, LII.

7. volumes of advice: See Keith Hopkins, “Contraception in the Roman Empire,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 8, no. 1 (1965): 124–51; Angus McLaren, A History of Contraception (London: Basil Blackwell, 1990); Sarah B. Pomeroy, Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves (New York: Schocken, 1975), 167–9; John M. Riddle’s Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992). Also Juvenal, Satire 6.595–6; NH, VI.42; Soranus, I.60–65.

8. The swelling Nile: Diodorus, I.36.7. For flora and fauna I have drawn on Poole, 2003. For river conditions, W. M. Flinders Petrie, Social Life in Ancient Egypt (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1923), 129–68; Amelia B. Edwards, A Thousand Miles up the Nile (London: Century, 1982), 319ff.

9. On the birthday gifts: Préaux, 1939, 394. Neal, 1975, suggests that the timing was so perfect that C may have chosen that date on which to announce the birth. She issued gold coins that year, one of only two occasions on which she did so.

10. Isis association: Pelling, 1999, 251–2; Ashton, 2008, 138. See Claire Préaux, Le monde hellénistique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1978), II, 650–5; Sarolta A. Takacs, Isis and Serapis in the Roman World (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1995); R. E. Witt, Isis in the Graeco-Roman World (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971). On Isis’s fate on the northern side of the Mediterranean, see especially Sharon Kelly Heyob, The Cult of Isis among Women in the Graeco-Roman World (Leiden, Holland: E. J. Brill, 1975).

11. The ax-wielding consul: Valerius, 1.3.41.

12. Ceremonial attire: O. E. Kaper to author, March 16, 2010.

13. “the queen should have greater power”: Diodorus, I.27. On Isis and women: Préaux, 1959, 127–75. Many have pointed to Isis’s involvement with the Virgin Mary; Foertmeyer, 1989, 279, notes that as late as the sixteenth century, a French cardinal smashed a statue to pieces on discovering it to be a representation of Isis rather than of the Virgin.

14. On the state and the clergy: Thompson, 1988. Guy Weill Goudchaux, “Cleopatra’s Subtle Religious Strategy,” in Walker and Higgs, 2001, 128–41. Also E. A. E. Reymond and J. W. B. Barns, “Alexandria and Memphis: Some Historical Observations,” Orientalia 46 (1977): 1–33. For the grant of asylum, see Kent J. Rigsby, Asylia: Territorial Inviolability in the Hellenistic World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). On the temple hierarchy, Gilles Gorré, “Les relations du clergé égyptien et des Lagides,” in Royaumes et cités hellénistiques des années 323–55 av. JC, Olivier Picard and others, eds. (Paris: SEDES, 2003), 44–55.

15. The synagogue grant: Rigsby, 1996, 571–2.

16. The flood measurements: NH, X.li.60 on the Nile, V.x.58 on the heights. On the behavior of the Nile, Lewis, 1983, 105–15; Achilles Tatius, IV.11–15. Strabo is otherwise the best river guide.

17. “There was no famine”: See Jacques Vandier, La famine dans l’Egypte ancienne (New York: Arno Press, 1979), 35ff; as well as Dorothy Thompson, “Nile Grain Transport under the Ptolemies,” in Peter Garnsey et al., eds., Trade in the Ancient Economy (London: Chatto & Windus, 1983), 64–75. Heinen, “Hunger, Misery, Power,” reprinted in 2009, 258–87, notes that the ruling class won points as well for its benevolence and that the crises were often exaggerated. To stress the people’s misery was further to extol official munificence.

18. “Anyone familiar”: Flatterer, 790A. Centuries earlier Antigonus Gonatas, a particularly clear-eyed Macedonian king, had informed his son that the royalty business was “a glorious state of slavery.” Dio, LII.X.2, put it similarly: It was the sovereign’s fate to “always and everywhere both see and hear, do and suffer, only that which is disagreeable.”

19. the formulaic correspondence: AJ, XII.148, XII.166, XIV.306.

20. lulled an earlier Ptolemy to sleep: Flatterer, 71d. The tutor who slapped the dozing Ptolemy V Epiphanes awake was rewarded with a goblet of poison.

21. crush of business: For the paperwork, see Peter van Minnen, “Further Thoughts on the Cleopatra Papyrus,” Archiv für Papyrusforschung 47 (2001): 74–80; Peter van Minnen, “An Official Act of Cleopatra,” Ancient Society 30 (2000): 29–34.

22. “unadultered and without delay”: Thompson, 1983, 71; also Christopher Haas, Alexandria in Late Antiquity: Topography and Social Conflict (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 40–4. Generally on the functioning of the economy, Rostovtzeff, 1998; Préaux, 1939; Tarn and Griffin, 1959; Thompson, 1988; Dominic Rathbone, “Ptolemaic to Roman Egypt: The Death of the Dirigiste State?,” Cambridge Philological Society 26 (2000): 44–54.

23. “nobody is allowed”: Cited in M. M. Austin, The Hellenistic World from Alexander to the Roman Conquest: A Selection of Source Materials in Translation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 561.

24. “knew each day”: William Tarn, Hellenistic Civilization (London: Edward Arnold, 1959), 195.

25. “cheer everybody up”: Select Papyri, 1995, II.204.

26. “We may conclude”: Dorothy Crawford’s illuminating “The Good Official of Ptolemaic Egypt,” in Das Ptolemäische Agypten: Akten des internationalen Symposions 1976 (Mainz, Germany: von Zabern, 1978), 202.

27. “stolen donkeys”: John Bauschatz, “Policing the Chora: Law Enforcement in Ptolemaic Egypt,” Ph.D. dissertation (Duke University, 2005), 68.

28. They preyed equally: Bingen, “Les tensions structurelles de la société ptolémaïque,” Atti del XVII Conresso Internazionale di Papirologia III (Naples, 1984): 921–937; Rathbone, 2000.

29. On the grievances: Bagnall and Derow, 2004; Bevan, 1968; Maehler, 1983; Rostovtzeff, 1998. And on the benevolence: William Linn Westermann, “The Ptolemies and the Welfare of Their Subjects,” American Historical Review 43, no. 2 (1938): 270–87.

30. The infirm father: Select Papyri, II, 233. The girl had run away with her layabout of a boyfriend and—claimed her father—would no longer provide him with the necessities of life, despite having signed a contract to do so.

31. “come early in the morning”: Select Papyri, II.266. Translation from M. Rostovtzeff, “A Large Estate in Egypt in the Third Century BC: A Study in Economic History,” University of Wisconsin Studies 6, 1922, 120.

32. Taxation cases forbidden: Rostovtzeff, 1998, II, 1094.

33. “scalded my belly”: Cited in Bagnall and Derow, 1981, 195.

34. “When we inherited”: Cicero, The Republic, V.I.2. The translation is from Everitt, 2003, 180.

35. On Auletes and the family fortune: T. Robert S. Broughton, “Cleopatra and ‘The Treasure of the Ptolemies,’ ” American Journal of Philology 63, no. 3 (1942): 328–32. Here too opinions differ: Maehler, 1983, subscribes to “undisturbed prosperity.” Bowman, Casson, Ricketts, and Tarn agree. Rostovtzeff, 1998, is certain of C’s personal treasure but less sanguine about the economy under her reign, III, 1548. Thompson, Broughton, and Will see an economy in decline if not disarray. Athenaeus accuses C’s father of having dissipated the fortune of Egypt, V.206d. In 63 Cicero found Egypt still a flourishing kingdom, De Lege Agraria, II.XVI.44.

36. On the devaluation and C’s coins, see Guy Weill Goudchaux, “Was Cleopatra Beautiful? The Conflicting Answers of Numismatics,” in Walker and Higgs, 2001, 210–14. Chauveau, 2000, 86, succinctly terms devaluation “the ancient equivalent of printing money.”

37. “the equivalent of all of the hedge fund”: Interview with Roger Bagnall, November 21, 2008.

38. palace drinking contest: Athenaeus, X.415. Athenaeus (XII.522) also mentions that a philosopher earned twelve talents a year, which sounds high. The bail is from Casson, 2001, 35; he equates fifteen talents with millions of modern dollars. For the impressive monuments, Peter Green, Alexander of Macedon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 414. Marrinan, 1998, asserts that you could hire an army of 10,000 men for a year with 1,000 talents, 16. Diodorus reports that for a lowly Roman craftsman a talent was the equivalent of seventeen years’ wages, Josephus ( JW, I.483) that a prince with a private income of 100 talents was a man to be reckoned with. During the honeymoon of Egypto-Roman relations, a visiting Roman dignitary was offered gifts worth eighty talents—so immodest a sum he did not accept (Plutarch, “Lucullus,” 2). On a more prosaic level, a talent bought enough wheat to feed a man for seventy-five years. See also Tarn and Griffin, 1959, 112–16.

39. one contemporary list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richest_man_in_history.

40. The trip to Rome: This is based on the best educated guess in the business, that of Casson. Interviews, January 26, 2009, and June 18, 2009. See also Casson, 1971; Casson, The Ancient Mariners (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991); Casson, 1994. He describes the entire arduous system in “The Feeding of the Trireme Crews and an Entry in IG ii2 1631,” Transactions of the American Philological Association 125 (1995): 261–9; and in “The Isis and Her Voyage,” Transactions of the American Philological Association 81 (1950): 43–56. Casson to author, December 9, 2008. For comparisons see Philo, “Against Flaccus,” V.25ff, “On the Embassy to Gaius,” 250–3; JW, 1.280; Horace, Satires, I.5; Germanicus’s travels in Tacitus, Annals, II.50; Casson on Cicero and Pliny, 1994, 149–53. C may well have docked at Ostia, which Bagnall and Thompson think more likely; Casson preferred Puzzuoli, as there were at the time no docking facilities of any size at Ostia (Casson, 1991, 199). It is not impossible that C embarked or disembarked at Brundisium as would Horace (heading west) and as had Cicero, heading east. From there she would have made the long trek overland through hill country and along the Appian Way. That trip could be done in about seven days (Casson, 1994, 194–6).

41. The risks at sea: Achilles Tatius gives a fine (fictional) account of shipwreck, III.2–6. He washes up at Pelusium.

42. arrival in Rome: Eusebius, 183.3.

43. “like a camel”: Dio, XLIII. 23.2–3. See also Strabo, 16.4.16.

44. The advice regarding royal travel: Letter of Aristeas, 249, cited in T. A. Sinclair, A History of Greek Political Thought (London: Routledge, 1959), 292.

45. “two chariots”: An appalled Cicero to Atticus, 115 (V.1), February 20, 50, translation from Boissier, 1970, 120. Similarly Foertmeyer, 224; Plutarch, “Crassus,” XXI.6; Préaux, 1939, 561.

46. On the Rome of foul air and poor hygiene, and on the idyllic Janiculum: Leon Homo, Rome impériale et l’urbanisme dans l’antiquité (Paris: Albin Michel, 1951); Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities, III.xlv; Horace, Odes, II.29, 9–12; Martial, Epigrams, IV.64. Otherwise Cicero remains the best guide to Rome. The stray hand and ox: Suetonius, “Vespasian,” 5.4.

47. “Only the priests”: JC, LIX (ML translation).

48. “the only intelligent calendar”: O. Neugebauer, The Exact Sciences in Antiquity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1952), 71. For the Egyptian calendar (twelve months of thirty days, to which were added five days, and at the end of every fourth year six days), see Strabo, 17.1.29.

49. “to make them more desirous”: DJ, XLII.

50. “Easier for two philosophers”: Seneca, Apocolocyntosis, 2.2.

51. On the Roman triumph: Appian, Dio, Florus, Suetonius, and Mary Beard’s superb The Roman Triumph (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007).

52. “the most fortunate captive”: JC, LV.2.

53. “a woman and once considered”: Dio, XLIII.xix.3–4.

54. infants or chickens: On the political and legal rights of women, Mary Beard and Michael Crawford, Rome in the Late Republic (London: Duckworth, 2005), 41.

55. hundred swordsmen: Cicero to Quintus, 12.2 (II.9), June 56.

56. “Even if his slaves” to “carvers”: Juvenal, Satire 9, 100ff.

57. “absolutely devoted” to “bloom of youth”: Dio, XLIII.xliii.4.

58. “among the friends and allies”: Dio, XLIII.xxviii.1. Gruen, 1984, 259, challenges the date of the statue’s installation. He moves it forward by some fifteen years, to make it a tribute not to C but to her defeat.

59. “No one dances”: Cicero, Pro Murena, 13; translation from Otto Kiefer, Sexual Life in Ancient Rome (New York: Dorset Press, 1993), 166. As Athenaeus points out by contrast, “No other people are recorded as being more musical than the Alexandrians” (IV.176e).

60. “You have to be a very rich”: Juvenal, Satire 3, 236. The flying pots are also his, Ibid., 270ff.

61. “Otherwise he wouldn’t be so good”: Plutarch citing Antisthenes, “Pericles,” I.5.

62. “not a real man”: Athenaeus, V.206d.

63. “superficially civilized”: Lucan, in P. F. Widdows’s translation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 544.

64. “the last word”: Casson, 1998, 104.

65. “idle and foolish”: NH, XXXVI.xvi.75. In the Loeb, “They rank as a superfluous and foolish display of wealth.”

66. Greek and Latin: Quintilian acknowledges that the world sounded harsher in Latin, shorn as it was of the sweetest Greek letters, with which “the language at once seems to brighten us up and smile” (12.10).

67. word… for “not possessing”: Seneca, Epistle LXXXVII.40.

68. “gold-inlay utensils”: Dalby, 2000, 123. Dalby notes that a Greek accent alone carried with it a whiff of luxury, 122. Similarly Dio, LVII.xv.3; Valerius, Book IX, 1, “Of Luxury and Lust.” It seemed impossible to describe excess without recourse to Greek. It is Dalby who observes that “the classic practical manual of sexual behavior was in Greek, 123.

69. On the rise of luxury: Livy, 39.6; NH, XXXVI; Plutarch, “Caius Marius,” 34; Athenaeus, XII; Horace, Odes II, xv; Dalby, 2000; Wiseman, 1985, 102ff.

70. The stolen napkins: Catullus, Poems, 12 and 25; NH, 19.2.

71. the beautiful vase of poisonous snakes: Saint Jerome, cited in Jasper Griffin, “Virgil Lives!,” New York Review of Books ( June 26, 2008): 24.

72. Women in Rome: Richard A. Bauman, Women and Politics in Ancient Rome (London: Routledge, 1992); Diana E. E. Kleiner and Susan B. Matheson, eds., I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery, 1996); Barbara S. Lesko, “Women’s Monumental Mark on Ancient Egypt,” Biblical Archeologist 54, no. 1 (1991), 4–15; Rawson, 1985; Marilyn B. Skinner’s fine Sexuality in Greek and Roman Culture (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005); Wyke, The Roman Mistress (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). Interview with Larissa Bonfante, February 2, 2009.

73. “Hard work”: Juvenal, Satire 6, 289ff.

74. “teasing, scolding”: Samuel Butler, The Humour of Homer, and Other Essays (London: A. C. Fifield, 1913), 60. Edith Hamilton remarks on the absence of deceived husbands in The Roman Way (New York: Norton, 1993), 35.

75. “There’s nothing a woman”: Juvenal, Satire 6, 460–1.

76. even C’s eunuchs were rich: Seneca, Epistle LXXXVII.16.

77. The much-discussed pearls: Suetonius, “Caligula,” XXXVII; Horace, Satire 2.iii.239; Pausanias, 8.18.6; NH, IX.lviii. C’s two pearls—“the largest in the whole of history”—are from Pliny, IX.119–121. Lucan too ropes a fortune in pearls around C’s neck and through her hair, X.139–40. See also Macrobius, The Saturnalia, 3.17.14. In that much later account C and MA arrive at a wager over the pearl in the course of their extravagant feasting. They are well matched; “It was as the slave of this gluttony that he [MA] wished to make an Egyptian kingdom of the empire of Rome.” Plancus good-naturedly umpires the contest. For centuries C’s name remained a synonym for extravagance. In the fifth century AD Sidonius (Letter VIII.xii.8) described the most lavish of dinners as akin to “a feast of Cleopatra’s.”

78. “When I boiled a pearl”: B. L. Ullman, “Cleopatra’s Pearls,” Classical Journal 52, no. 5 (1957): 196. See also Prudence J. Jones, “The Cleopatra Cocktail,” 1999, http://www.apaclassics.org/AnnualMeeting/99mtg/abstracts/jonesp.html. She finds the pearls do dissolve. Keats included the melted pearls in “Modern Love.”

79. “the leaves at the top”: Hesiod, Works and Days, 680–1.

80. “did not let” to “name to the child”: DJ, LII.2.

81. “was her best card”: Aly, 1989, 51.

82. needed to press her case: Interview with Roger Bagnall, November 11, 2008.

83. passionate, admiring letters: Dio, LI.xii.3.

84. “A more raffish assemblage”: Cicero to Atticus, 16 (I.16.), early July 61. On broadening C’s base of support, Andrew Meadows to author, March 5, 2010.

85. On C’s concern with the reorganization of the East: Gruen, 2003, 271.