Seductress (32 page)

Machtweiber
comprise three groups: the absolute monarchs who mirror the original goddess, the divine ordainers who sanctify male rule, and the revolutionary activists who reflect the modern demonization of the she-deity. Though all the following politicas key off from the master image of the Great Goddess, the autocrats came closest to filling her shoes.

Over life size, omnicapable, and grandiose, they deliberately exploited their mythic charge. In elaborate promotional campaigns, they impersonated the divinity and swathed themselves in archetypic panoply and cave rite spectacle. Patriarchy obstructed them at every turn and often cramped their personal sex lives. But they couldn’t stop these heiresses of the ancient Queen of the Cosmos from doing it Her way—the holistic love-work way—and becoming some of the greatest monarchs of history.

In a culture that deified the royal family, Cleopatra was born a goddess, and not just any goddess but Aphrodite/Isis, the “most profoundly satisfying of all,” heiress of the first divinity. She was also a shrewd publicist who leveraged her political career on her divine persona. With men and nations sucked up in her undertow, she could work her will as she wished on the ancient world.

Contrary to her siren-in-slinkwear reputation, Cleopatra was actually “one of the greatest politicians of all time.” At the same time, she set the gold standard for seduction. An archfascinator, she conquered the twin titans of the age and put her charms to brilliant political and erotic account.

Hollywood got her all wrong. Short and zaftig, she resembled Elizabeth Taylor only in cup size. She looked more like a “before” plastic surgery profile: a low, beetling brow, large, hooked nose, prognathic jaw, and a wide, thin-lipped mouth. And her personality was anything but dumb starlet. She had brains, character, and edge. Born the third in succession to the Ptolemaic throne in 69 B.C., she learned the
enkuklios paideia
(origin of our encyclopedia) with the boys of the royal household, a polymathic curriculum of literature, rhetoric, philosophy, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, medicine, drawing, singing, lyre playing, and horsemanship. A passionate scholar, Cleopatra excelled in science and language, mastering eight languages and becoming the first of the Greek Ptolemys to speak Egyptian. At ten she received her initiation into cutthroat politics. Her older sister, Berenice, dethroned their father, and Cleopatra fled with him to Rome, where they bribed and groveled their way through the hierarchy for three years. With Roman funds, they retook Egypt, wreaked carnage, and executed Berenice.

On her father’s death in 51 B.C., Cleopatra was crowned Queen of Kings and coruler with her ten-year-old brother, Ptolemy XIII. She walked into a land mine. With her brother’s party in the wings plotting to oust her, she faced a country on the brink of anarchy—rebelling nationalists, marauding bandits, bankruptcy, famine, and escalating dependence on Rome.

She proved more than equal to the task. As the “living law” she ingratiated herself with the native population through grandstand public appearances as Isis, then stabilized the economy, settled strife, established order, and checkmated Roman aggression. When her brother at last overthrew her, she counterattacked in a bold rearguard strike. She waited for Julius Caesar, the new strongman of the Roman Empire, to invade Alexandria to exploit the coup and smuggled herself into his presence in a rolled-up rug.

The fifty-two-year-old general was a jaded ladies’ man, long accustomed to backstage groupies. But Cleopatra “spellbound” him “the moment he set eyes on her and she opened her mouth to speak.” Captivated by her “playful temperament,” “charm of her conversation,” intelligence, and esprit, he made her his mistress that night and championed her cause.

He defeated her enemies in battle, installed her as sole ruler with another underage brother, and instead of annexing Egypt, a logical move, promised autonomy and returned the island of Cyprus. They celebrated their victory in a triumphal tour down the Nile in gods’ costumes. Later Caesar summoned Cleopatra and their son, Caesarion, to Rome. It was more than a sexual diversion. He gave her a mansion on the Tiber, erected her golden statue in a temple to Venus Genetrix, and increasingly sought her counsel. He initiated legislation to marry her and implemented many of her ideas—calendar reform, library and canal design—and the theocratic Eastern concept of absolute rule that led to his assassination.

After his murder Cleopatra was a marked woman, mother of Caesar’s only male heir and traitor to the revolutionary cause. But she saved her skin through adroit diplomacy. She escaped to Egypt, where she sat out the civil war by shrewdly appeasing both sides. Meanwhile she boosted the gross national product and consolidated her power. She commissioned public artworks that immortalized her divinity and ordered costumed processionals hymning her grandeur. “I am Isis, mistress of every land,” sang priestesses. “I gave and ordained laws for men which no one is able to change.”

When the tide turned against the conspirators, Cleopatra leveled her seductive forces at the new regime. Saturating the Near East with advance publicity, she sailed up the Cydnus River in a golden three-hundred-foot barge to meet Marc Antony, Octavian’s coruler and commander of the eastern half of the empire. He was a handsome, muscled Hercules, a notorious womanizer with a crude, bluff barracks hall manner.

Cleopatra’s grand opera entrance “completely overwhelmed” him. Dressed in the diaphanous robes of Isis/Aphrodite and enthroned on a silver poop, she drew into port with a crew of nubile nymphs swinging perfumed censers and playing musical instruments. Four nights of feasts, at her expense, followed. These were masterpieces of big top dazzle, banquets with light shows, jeweled place settings, extravagant menus, carpets of rose petals, and costly gifts. The philistine Antony went down like a sack of sand. Unhinged, unhorsed, he forgot to upbraid Cleopatra for inadequate support (his original plan) and followed her to Alexandria.

Over the next year she locked up her conquest. Playing to Antony’s hedonistic sensuality, she introduced him to the
vie de luxe—
Oriental style. Eight dinners were prepared each night so that the food could be “served to perfection,” gala fetes were mounted, and the “sophisticated erotic techniques of the East” deployed in the bedroom. Her turnout was pure goddess
abbondanza.
An expert in cosmetics (she wrote a treatise on the subject), she made up her plain face with hieratic glamour and wore see-through Sidonian silks adorned with Red Sea pearl earrings and artfully chased gold brooches. Heady perfumes suffused the palace—a monument to sybaritic enjoyment with vaulted gold and ebony ceilings and soft, embroidered couches.

This was a palace of revolving delights. Cleopatra provided a constant supply of novelties, from her jump-cut mood changes to impromptu expeditions through town in servants’ disguises. She practiced a “thousand forms of flattery” on her roughneck lover, treating him “without the least reserve.”

But she kept him up to the mark (not pleasure-drugged, as critics claim) and spurred him to conquest and glory. She also drove a hard bargain. In exchange for military aid in Parthia, she forced Antony to execute her enemies, including her sister Arsinoe, and give her parts of Asia Minor and Syria.

After Antony’s return to Rome, political marriage to Octavian’s sister, and three-year absence, Cleopatra made him pay for it. When he came back to Egypt still lovestruck, she enlisted him in her master plan to restore her empire to its original size. She made him fork over eastern provinces, legitimize their twins, and name Caesarion heir to the kingdom.

Envisioning a Roman-Egyptian dynasty, Cleopatra and Antony staged a sumptuous donations ceremony in which they sanctified their union, crowned their children, and filed through the streets in a triumphal procession as Isis and Dionysus reborn. In a final affront to Rome, Antony erected a statue of Cleopatra/Isis on the Acropolis and bathed her feet in public.

When the inevitable war with Octavian broke out, Cleopatra dispatched herself—unlike the canards—with exemplary military acumen. Even Antony’s general praised “her capacity as a ruler” and strategic “intelligence.” She fled the Battle of Actium by prearrangement and masterminded a comeback from the Red Sea that failed by a fluke. In the end she went out goddess style. Determined not to be paraded through Rome in chains, she died bedecked as Isis, poisoned by the sacred cobra, simultaneously outwitting Octavian and affirming her divinity and immortality.

Loathed by the Romans and feared by church fathers, she’s been typecast as a vamp ever since, a “lascivious and insatiable” mantrap. Even a feminist scholar attacked her recently for her “sexual wiles,” concluding that she failed because “she was forced into the same trap as every woman who uses sex to get her man.”

But Cleopatra, the goddess-queen’s deputy on earth, made sex the cornerstone of her politics, the better to rule, the better to love whom she liked. She might not have “failed” at all had it not been for Roman prejudice and superior might.

In fact she avoided the feminine “trap.” She transcended gender roles, rose to the highest distinction as sovereign, and molded the destinies of the two greatest men of the world, all with eros and queenship working in perfect concert. Antony fell on his sword, content that he would meet her in the afterlife, his “most triumphant lady” and the “Queen Himself.”

The scene is engraved in stained glass in the British historical imagination: Elizabeth I dressed as an “Amazonian empress” addressing the troops on Tilbury Plain. “I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman but I have the stomach of a king,” she exhorts. “I myself will be your general, judge, and rewarder.”

Elizabeth rivaled Cleopatra as a self-mythologizer. Brought to the throne when female rulers were thought “more than” “monsters,” she threw dust in the eyes of her misogynistic adversaries by cunningly identifying herself with the goddess. To deflect male hostility, she pleaded feminine weakness and chose lesser deities for her imagos: Diana the moon goddess, Astraea, goddess of justice, and, as at Tilbury, an Amazonian queen. But the archaic Great Goddess was the true seat of her power.

On a personal level, it’s true, sixteenth-century sexism condemned her to sublimated sexual gamesmanship and chaste flirtations. As queen, though, she was the mythic first imperatrix incarnate, governing through an inspired amalgam of sex and politics. She maneuvered England out of chaos and dissension into world-class leadership and at the same time made herself the love object of not only the nation but a battalion of hot-bodied cavaliers.

Elizabeth’s childhood, like Cleopatra’s, was a rough nursery. From infancy to her inauguration at twenty-five, she walked a political high wire without a safety net. Her father beheaded her mother when she was three, after which her own life as a possible claimant to the crown hung on the vagaries of warring factions at court. Every move was “fraught with danger and disaster.” She lost her first lover to the block in a conspiracy over her accession, and she was sent to the Tower and very nearly killed several times by her half sister, Queen Mary.

Early on she learned the survival skills of a Machiavella: caution, circumspection, self-possession, deceit, patience, and the art of “answerless answers.” She also developed a Mistress of the Universe mind and character. Given the Renaissance training of boys, she rode, danced, played musical instruments, and aced academics. She spoke six languages, mastered history, rhetoric, and moral philosophy, and had a gigabyte memory. Her sense of self was heaven-scaling. “God hath raised me high,” she said; “my sex cannot diminish my prestige.”

Foreshadowing her future goddess strategy, Elizabeth orchestrated her coronation to evoke a visitation from on high. Bonfires, bells, and choreographed pageants celebrated the arrival of the new Deborah, a semidivine national savior.

She engineered her appearance for iconic effect. Though not pretty—long-faced and hooknosed with narrow lips and an unruly head of red curls—she applied heavy maquillage and skin whiteners to give her face a masklike aura. Her costume trailed clouds of glory. Cut to the cleavage and festooned with “jewels,” it was a billowing confection of gold and silver trimmed with ermine. Her rings contained “tiny portraits of herself.” During the procession to Westminster Abbey, she “wonderfully ravished” the people through press-the-flesh declarations of love.

Once in office, she wheeled out the same seductive weaponry. Confronting unprecedented hostility to female sovereigns and a country in shambles—rampant debt, religious conflict, corruption, and no police or standing army—she “gained obedience without constraint” by drawing counselors, magnates, and Parliament into a web of quasi-erotic relationships. “Flirtation was her life blood.” She handled business like a courtship dance. She scintillated, teased, flattered, prevaricated, and put men through hoops with her vacillations, contradictions, and haughty regality.

In the process she restored Britain to order and prosperity. She established a universally acceptable Protestant church, rejuvenated the economy, built up defense, and negotiated the withdrawal of the French from Scotland. During the Pax Britannia that followed, England’s prestige at home and abroad soared: Industry and trade expanded, arts flourished, and the population boomed.

Elizabeth astutely safeguarded this reign of prosperity and her determination to be “governed by no one.” She forestalled demands that she marry, a key bone of contention in her rule, through a lifelong anticipation waltz. Intent on preserving her divinely sanctioned hegemony, she averted male domination (legally enforced in sixteenth-century marriages) with promises and retractions for decades.

Reviving the old chivalric tradition, she positioned herself as the love queen of a romantic court idyll. Dressed in gem-encrusted, décolleté finery, she gave off
odeur de marjoram
at a time when few bathed. She put men at ease with her “mouth-filling oaths” and onslaught of comic palaver. Sometimes men laughed so much at her dinners they forgot to talk politics. She was an enchanting conversationalist, eloquent and sharp-tongued and versed in myriad subjects. As awhirl with élan as the life force herself, she enlivened every party and danced like a professional—difficult gaillards, full of cabrioles and heel-clicking leaps.