Cleopatra: A Life

regal way up the sphinx-lined causeway to the richly painted temple in 51, Cleopatra “was seen by all.” We have the description from a line of hieroglyphics, a ceremonial language with a distinct political purpose, perhaps best described as “boasting made permanent.” There is evidence in Cleopatra’s first year of her ambition as well. Her brother’s name is absent from official documents, where he should have figured as Cleopatra’s superior. Nor is he in evidence on her coins; Cleopatra’s commanding portrait appears alone. Coinage qualifies as a kind of language, too. It is the only one in which she speaks to us in her own voice, without Roman interpreters. This was how she presented herself to her subjects.

She was less adept at assimilating the lesson of Berenice. Pothinus, Achillas, and Theodotus took poorly to this independent-minded upstart, so intent on ruling alone. They had a formidable ally in the Nile, which refused to cooperate with the new queen. The country’s well-being depended entirely on the height of the flood; drought compromised the food supply and the social order. The flood of 51 was poor, that of the following summer little better. Priests complained of shortages that prevented them from performing rituals. Towns emptied as hungry villagers poured into Alexandria. Thieves roamed the land. Prices increased dramatically; the distress was universal. By October 50, when it became clear that drastic measures were in order, Cleopatra’s brother was back on the scene. At the end of that month the royal couple jointly issued an emergency decree. They rerouted wheat and dried vegetables from the countryside north. Hungry Alexandrians were more dangerous than hungry villagers; it was in everyone’s best interest to appease them. The edict was to be reinforced in the time-honored way: Offenders received a death sentence. Denunciations were encouraged, informants richly rewarded. (A free man received a third of the guilty party’s property. A slave obtained a sixth, along with his freedom.) At the same time, Ptolemy XIII and Cleopatra offered incentives to those who remained behind to cultivate the land. Either some oppressing or some coercing took place in those months at the palace as well. The two siblings may have been working in tandem for the good of the country. Or Ptolemy may have been undermining his sister, starving her constituents for the sake of his. Both siblings issued the emergency edict. Cleopatra’s name appears second.

Already on treacherous ground, she twice over the next year fell into the trap that had swallowed her father. At the end of June 50, two sons of the Roman governor of Syria arrived in Alexandria, to coax the troops who had restored Auletes to return to the fold. They were needed elsewhere. Those soldiers had no interest in leaving Egypt, where Auletes had amply rewarded them for their service, and where many had started families. They emphatically declined the invitation, by murdering the governor’s sons. Cleopatra might have meted out justice herself but opted instead to secure Rome’s goodwill with a theatrical flourish: she sent the murderers to Syria in chains, a move she should have known would cost her the support of the army. And she continued to trade one vulnerability for another. Roman requests for military assistance were as common in Alexandria as were requests for dynastic interventions in Rome. They were not universally granted, although Auletes had initially won Pompey’s favor by providing him with troops. In 49 Pompey’s son made a similar request of Cleopatra, applying for assistance in his father’s campaign against Caesar. Cleopatra faithfully offered up grain, soldiers, and a fleet, all at a time of dire agricultural distress. This was most likely her Cyprus. Within months her name disappears from all documentation, and she had fled for her life, to wind up camped in the Syrian desert with her band of mercenaries.

SHORTLY AFTER CLEOPATRA’S October 48 arrival, Caesar moved from the villa on the royal grounds to the palace proper. Each generation of Ptolemies had added to that sprawling complex, as magnificent in its design as in its materials. “Pharaoh” means “the greatest household” in ancient Egyptian, and on this the Ptolemies had delivered. The palace included well over a hundred guest rooms. Caesar looked out at lush grounds dotted with fountains and statuary and guesthouses; a vaulted walkway led from the palace complex to its theater, which stood on higher terrain. No Hellenistic monarchs did opulence better than the Ptolemies, the preeminent importers of Persian carpets, of ivory and gold, tortoiseshell and panther skin. As a general rule any surface that could be ornamented was—with garnet and topaz, with encaustic, with brilliant mosaic, with gold. The coffered ceilings were studded with agate and lapis, the cedar doors with mother-of-pearl, the gates overlaid with gold and silver. Corinthian capitals shimmered with ivory and gold. Cleopatra’s palace boasted the greatest profusion of precious materials known at the time.

Insofar as it was possible to be comfortable while under siege, Cleopatra and Caesar were well accommodated. None of the extravagant tableware or plush furnishings of their redoubt detracted, however, from the fact that Cleopatra—virtually alone in the city—was eager for a Roman to involve himself in Egyptian affairs. The rumbles and jeers outside, the scuffling in the street, the whizzing stones, drove that point home. The most intense fighting took place in the harbor, which the Alexandrians attempted to blockade. Early on they managed to set fire to several Roman freighters. The fleet Cleopatra had lent Pompey had moreover returned. Both sides jockeyed for control of those fifty quadriremes and quinqueremes, large vessels requiring four and five banks of rowers. Caesar could not afford to allow the ships to fall into enemy hands if he expected to see either provisions or reinforcements, for which he had sent out calls in every direction. Nor could he hope to man them. He was seriously outnumbered and at a geographic disadvantage; in desperation, he set fire to the anchored warships. Cleopatra’s reaction as flames spread over the ropes and across the decks is difficult to imagine. She could not have escaped the penetrating clouds of smoke, sharp with the tang of resin, that wafted across her gardens; the palace was illuminated by the blaze, which burned well into the night. This was the dockyard fire that may have claimed some portion of the Alexandrian library. Nor could Cleopatra have missed the pitched battle that preceded the conflagration, for which the entire city turned out: “And there was not a soul in Alexandria, whether Roman or townsman, except for those whose attention was engrossed in fortification work or fighting, who did not make for the highest buildings and take their place to see the show from any vantage point, and with prayers and vows demand victory for their own side from the immortal gods.” Amid mingled shouts and much commotion, Caesar’s men scrambled on to Pharos to seize the great lighthouse. Caesar allowed them a bit of plunder, then stationed a garrison on the rocky island.

Also shortly after Cleopatra’s arrival, Caesar composed the final pages of the volume we know today as The Civil War. About those events he would have been writing in something close to real time. It has been suggested that he broke off where he did—with Arsinoe’s defection and Pothinus’s murder—for literary or political reasons. Caesar could not easily discourse on a Western republic in an Eastern palace. He was also at that juncture in his narrative briefly in possession of the upper hand. Just as likely Caesar found himself with less time to write, if not overwhelmed. He was indeed the man who famously dictated letters from his stadium seat, who turned out a text on Latin while traveling from Gaul, a long poem en route to Spain. The murder of the eunuch Pothinus had galvanized the opposition, however. Already it included the women and children of the city. They had no need of wicker screens or battering rams, happy as they were to express themselves with slingshots and stones. Sprays of homemade missiles pelted the palace walls. Battles flared night and day, as Alexandria filled with zealous reinforcements and with siege huts and catapults of various sizes. Triple-width, forty-foot stone barricades went up across the city, transformed into an armed camp.

From the palace Caesar observed what had put Alexandria on the map and what made it so difficult to rule: its people were endlessly, boundlessly resourceful. His men watched in amazement—and with resentment; ingenuity was meant to be a Roman specialty—as the Alexandrians constructed wheeled, ten-story assault towers. Draft animals led those mammoth contraptions down the straight, paved avenues of the city. Two things in particular astonished the Romans. Everything could be accomplished more quickly in Alexandria. And its people were clever copyists of the first rank. Repeatedly they went Caesar one better. As a Roman general recounted later, they “put into effect whatever they saw us do with such skill that it seemed our troops had imitated their work.” National pride was at stake on both sides. When Caesar bested the seafaring Alexandrians in a naval battle, they were shattered. Subsequently they threw themselves into the task of building a fleet. In the secret royal dockyard sat a number of old ships, no longer seaworthy. Down came colonnades and the roofs of gymnasiums, their rafters magically transformed into oars. In a matter of days, twenty-two quadriremes and five quinqueremes materialized, along with a number of smaller craft, manned and ready for combat. Nearly overnight, the Egyptians conjured up a navy twice as large as Caesar’s.^*

Repeatedly the Romans sputtered about the twin Alexandrian capacities for deceit and treachery, which in the midst of an armed conflict surely counts as high praise. As if to prove the point, Ganymedes, Arsinoe’s ex-tutor and the new royal commander, set his men to work digging deep wells. They drained the city’s underground conduits, into which they pumped seawater. Quickly the palace water proved cloudy and undrinkable. (Ganymedes may or may not have known this to be an old trick of Caesar’s, who had similarly annoyed Pompey.) The Romans