Cleopatra: A Life (44 page)

Since Cleopatra’s death her fortunes have waxed and waned as dramatically as they did in her lifetime. Her power has been made to derive from her sexuality, for obvious reason; as one of Caesar’s murderers had noted,
“How much more attention
people pay to their fears than to their memories!” It has always been preferable to attribute a woman’s success to her beauty rather than to her brains, to reduce her to the sum of her sex life. Against a powerful enchantress there is no contest. Against a woman who ensnares a man in the coils of her serpentine intelligence—in her ropes of pearls—there should, at least, be some kind of antidote. Cleopatra unsettles more as sage than as seductress; it is less threatening to believe her fatally attractive than fatally intelligent. (Menander’s fourth-century adage—
“A man who teaches a woman
to write should recognize that he is providing poison to an asp”—was still being copied
out by schoolchildren hundreds of years after her death.) It also makes a better story. Propertius sets the tone. Cleopatra was for him a wanton seductress, “the whore queen,” later “a woman of insatiable sexuality and insatiable avarice” (Dio), a carnal sinner (Dante), “the whore of the eastern kings” (Boccaccio), a poster child for unlawful love (Dryden).
^*
Propertius has her fornicating with her slaves. A first-century Roman would assert (falsely) that
“ancient writers repeatedly speak
of Cleopatra’s insatiable libido.” In one ancient account she is so insatiable that
“she often played the prostitute.”
(She is also both so beautiful and toxic that
“many men bought nights
with her at the price of their lives.”) In the estimation of one nineteenth-century woman, she was
“a dazzling piece of witchcraft.”
Florence Nightingale referred to her as
“that disgusting Cleopatra.”
Offering her the movie role, Cecil B. DeMille is said to have asked Claudette Colbert,
“How would you like
to be the wickedest woman in history?” Cleopatra stars even in a 1928 book called
Sinners Down the Centuries.
In the match between the lady and the legend there is no contest.

The personal inevitably trumps the political, and the erotic trumps all: We will remember that Cleopatra slept with Julius Caesar and Mark Antony long after we have forgotten what she accomplished in doing so, that she sustained a vast, rich, densely populated empire in its troubled twilight, in the name of a proud and cultivated dynasty. She remains on the map for having seduced two of the greatest men of her time, while her crime was to have entered into those same
“wily and suspicious”
marital partnerships that every man in power enjoyed. She did so in reverse and in her own name; this made her a deviant, socially disruptive, an unnatural woman. To these she added a few other offenses. She made Rome feel uncouth, insecure, and poor, sufficient cause for anxiety without adding sexuality to the mix. For some time she haunted the ancient imagination, primarily as a cautionary tale. Under Augustus the institution of marriage took on a new luster, a development that
boded poorly for Cleopatra, the destabilizing, domineering home wrecker.

She elicited scorn and envy in equal and equally distorting measure; her story is constructed as much of male fear as fantasy. From Plutarch descends history’s greatest love story, though Cleopatra’s life was neither as lurid nor as romantic as has been made out. And she became a femme fatale twice over. For Actium to be the battle to beat all battles, she had to be the “wild queen” plotting Rome’s destruction. For Antony to have succumbed to something other than a fellow Roman, Cleopatra had to be a disarming seductress
“who had already ruined
him and would make his ruin still more complete.” It can be difficult to say where vengeance ends and homage begins. Her power was immediately enhanced because—for one man’s historical purposes—she needed to have reduced another to abject slavery. It is true that she was a dutiful, father-loving daughter, a patriot and protector, an early nationalist, a symbol of courage, a wise ruler with nerves of steel, a master at self-presentation. It is not true that she built the lighthouse of Alexandria, could manufacture gold, was the ideal woman (Gautier), a martyr to love (Chaucer), “a silly little girl” (Shaw), the
mother of Christ
. A seventh-century Coptic bishop termed her
“the most illustrious and wise
of women,” greater than the kings who preceded her. On a good day Cleopatra is said to have died for love, which is not exactly true either. Ultimately everyone from Michelangelo to Gérôme, from Corneille to Brecht, got a crack at her. The Renaissance was obsessed with her, the Romantics yet more so. She sent even
Shakespeare
over the top, eliciting from him his greatest female role, his richest poetry, a full, Antony-less last act, and, in the estimation of one critic,
a rollicking tribute to guilt-free middle-aged adultery
. Shakespeare may be as much to blame for our having lost sight of Cleopatra VII as the Alexandrian humidity, Roman propaganda, and Elizabeth Taylor’s limpid lilac eyes.

A center of intellectual jousting and philosophical marathons, Alexandria did not immediately surrender its vitality. It continued as the brain of the Mediterranean world for another century or so. Then it
began to dematerialize. With it went legal autonomy for women; the days of suing your father-in-law for the return of your dowry when your (insolvent) husband ran off and had a baby with another woman were over. After a fifth-century earthquake, Cleopatra’s palace slid into the Mediterranean. The lighthouse, the library, the museum, have all vanished. The Alexandrian harbor bears no relation to its Hellenistic proportions. The Nile itself has changed course. The city has sunk more than twenty feet. Even the coast of Actium—which Cleopatra must practically have memorized—has changed. Her Alexandria has long been almost entirely invisible, either underwater or buried beneath a teeming city that has largely forgotten its Hellenistic chapter. Ptolemaic culture evaporated as well. A great deal that Cleopatra knew would be forgotten for fifteen hundred years. A very different kind of woman, the Virgin Mary, would subsume Isis as entirely as Elizabeth Taylor has subsumed Cleopatra.

Our fascination with Cleopatra has only increased as a result; she is all the more mythic for her disappearance. The holes in the story keep us under her spell. And she continues to unsettle. All the issues that disrupt the dinner table, that go to our heads like snake venom, combine in her person. Two thousand years after she taunted Octavian with a very costly bonfire, nothing enthralls so much as excessive good fortune and devastating catastrophe. We still fight the battle of East and West, still lurch as uneasily as did Cicero between indulgence and restraint. Sex and power continue to combust in spectacular ways. Female ambition, accomplishment, authority, trouble us as they did the Romans, for whom Cleopatra was more a monster than a marvel, but undeniably a little of both.

Two thousand years of bad press and overheated prose, of film and opera, cannot conceal the fact that Cleopatra was a remarkably capable queen, canny and opportunistic in the extreme, a strategist of the first rank. Her career began with one brazen act of defiance and ended with another.
“What woman, what ancient succession
of men, was so great?” demands the anonymous author of a fragmentary Latin poem, which positions her as the principal player of the age. Boldly and bodily, she
inserted herself into world politics, with wide-reaching consequences. She convinced her people that a twilight was a dawn and—with all her might—struggled to make it so. In a desperate situation, she improvised wildly, then improvised afresh, for some a definition of genius. There was a glamour and a grandeur to her story well before either Octavian or Shakespeare got his hands on it. Hers was an exhilarating presence; before she sent Plutarch many pages out of his way she had the same effect on his countrymen. From our first glimpse of her to the last, she dazzles for her ability to set the scene. To the end she was mistress of herself, astute, spirited, inconceivably rich, pampered yet ambitious.

In her adult life Cleopatra would have met few people she considered her equal. To the Romans she was a stubborn, supreme exception to every rule. She remains largely incomparable: She had plenty of predecessors, few successors. With her, the age of empresses essentially came to an end. In two thousand years only one or two other women could be said to have wielded unrestricted authority over so vast a realm. Cleopatra remains nearly alone at the all-male table, in possession of a hand both flush and flawed. She got a very good deal right, and one crucial thing wrong. It is impossible to fathom how she could have felt at the end of the summer of 30, as Octavian closed in, as it became more and more clear that there were to be no further reversals of fortune, no more brilliantly salvaged futures, that she and Egypt were this time plainly lost.
“What is it to lose
your country—a great suffering?” a queen asks her son in Euripides. “The greatest, even worse than people say,” he replies. The fear and fury must have shattered Cleopatra as she realized she was to become the woman
“who destroyed the Egyptian monarchy
,” as a third-century AD chronicler has it. For her monumental loss there were no consolations, including—assuming she believed in one—a brilliant afterlife.

“I HAVE THUS
endeavored to sum up the evidence upon the case, as fairly as I can, and the result seems to be that the world must vibrate in a state of uncertainty as to what was the truth,” Boswell concludes of Richard Savage, proffering hope to generations of biographers. A number of scholars substantially reduced the Hellenistic vibrations, fielding questions that ranged from the elementary to the outlandish to the unanswerable. For their time, wisdom, and patient good humor I am grateful to Roger S. Bagnall, Mary Beard, Larissa Bonfante, the late Lionel Casson, Mostafa El-Abbadi, Bruce W. Frier, Norma Goldman, Mona Haggag, O. E. Kaper, Andrew Meadows, William M. Murray, David O’Connor, Sarah B. Pomeroy, John Swanson, Dorothy J. Thompson, and Branko van Oppen. I owe Roger Bagnall additional thanks for his close reading of the manuscript; any remaining inaccuracies are my own.

For help with and in Alexandria I am indebted to: Terry Garcia, Jean-Claude Golvin, Nimet Habachy, Walla Hafez, Mona Haggag, Zahi Hawass, Kate Hughes, Hisham Hussein, William La Riche, Mohamed Abdel Maksoud, Magda Saleh, and Marion Wood. Jack A. Josephson, Shelby White, and the American Numismatic Society’s Rick Witschonke kindly helped to locate or identify images.

It is a pleasure finally to acknowledge my admiration for the matchless Michael Pietsch, publisher extraordinaire, and for his colleagues at Little, Brown. At every stage they have set the gold standard. In particular I owe thanks to Mario Pulice, Vanessa Kehren, Liz Garriga, Tracy
Williams, Heather Fain, Heather Rizzo, and Betsy Uhrig. Jayne Yaffe Kemp read these pages sensitively and copyedited ruthlessly. It has been a privilege to work with Eric Simonoff, whose enthusiasm for this project has at times exceeded even my own. At William Morris I am grateful as well to Jessica Almon for shepherding book and author along.

For research and translation assistance I owe debts to Karina Attar, Matthew J. Boylan, Raffaella Cribiore, Kate Daloz, Sebastian Heath, Inger Kuin, the indefatigable Tom Puchniak, and Claudia Rader. At the New York Society Library Brandi Tambasco worked her customary interlibrary loan magic. I am grateful as well to the staff of the University of Alberta’s Rutherford Library and to the New York Public Library, as much a monument to civilization as was the ancient library of Alexandria.

For sound advice, kind words, and caffeine I have leaned on many indulgent friends but most heavily upon Wendy Belzberg, Lis Bensley, Alex Mayes Birnbaum, Judy Casson, Byron Dobell, Anne Eisenberg, Benita and Colin Eisler, Ellen Feldman, Patti Foster, Harry Frankfurt, Azza Kararah, Mitch Katz, Souad Kriska, Carmen Marino, Mameve and Howard Medwed, Helen Rosenthal, Andrea Versenyi, Meg Wolitzer, and Strauss Zelnick. Elinor Lipman remains the most discerning, generous, and articulate of first readers. On every level she has enhanced these pages and their author’s life. I would be lost without her.