Cleopatra: A Life (18 page)

“
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.