Cleopatra: A Life (17 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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