Cleopatra: A Life

than in his innumerable affairs. He was a masterly seducer, with a specialty in aristocratic wives. Both Cleopatra and Caesar manifested the intellectual curiosity that was the trademark of their age, a lightheartedness and a humor that set them apart from their peers, insofar as either had peers. Such an unsociable, solitary thing is power, notes Plutarch; generally those around Caesar and Cleopatra could be relied upon to fawn or plot. Both knew, as Caesar put it, that success came at a price, that “everything that lifts people above their fellows arouses both emulation and jealousy.” Theirs was an exclusive brand of social isolation.

Both had daringly crossed lines in their bids for power; both had let the dice fly. Both had as great a capacity for work as for play and rarely distinguished between the two. Caesar answered letters and petitions while attending games. Cleopatra engaged in games for reasons of state. Neither shrank from drama. Both were natural performers, as secure in their ability as in the conviction of their superiority. Much was expected of Cleopatra, who liked to surprise, believed in the grand geste, and did not sell herself short. Caesar put a premium on style and admired talent in all its forms; in Alexandria he was in the constant company of a deft conversationalist, linguist, and negotiator, one who shared his unusual gift for treating new acquaintances as if they were old intimates. There was ample reason on his part for close attention. Cleopatra provided a timely lesson in comportment. Having the year before been declared dictator, Caesar was enjoying his first taste of absolute power. Cleopatra moreover handled matters no woman of his acquaintance had touched. He would have been hard pressed to find a woman in all of Rome who had raised an army, lent a fleet, controlled a currency. As incandescent as was her personality, Cleopatra was every bit Caesar’s equal as a coolheaded, clear-eyed pragmatist, though what passed on his part as strategy would be remembered on hers as manipulation. Both were emerging from wars that had nothing to do with issues and everything to do with personalities. They had faced similar difficulties, with similar constituencies. Caesar was no favorite of the Roman aristocracy. Cleopatra was unloved by the Alexandrian Greeks. Their power derived from the common people. The ambitious shine especially in the company of the ambitious; Caesar and Cleopatra came together as might two heirs to legendary fortunes, larger than life and abundantly aware of their gifts, who are accustomed to thinking of themselves in the plural, or writing of themselves in the third person.

IN THE COURSE of one of Cleopatra’s banquets, Lucan imagines Caesar quizzing Egypt’s high priest. Caesar is a student of a great many subjects, a man of boundless curiosity. His love of exploration was as pronounced as his ambition. He was fascinated by Egyptian lore and culture; in Alexandria he conferred with scientists and philosophers. He has but one request. “There is nothing I would rather know,” he pleads, “than the causes of the river which lie hidden through so many ages and its unknown source.” If the priest will reveal the source of the Nile, Caesar will abandon warfare. The fervor was understandable. Few mysteries of the ancient world were as compelling; the source of the Nile was the life on Mars of its day. Lucan is the first to mention Caesar and Cleopatra’s cruise on the river, 110 years after the fact. He admired neither party and was writing verse; he has been called “the father of yellow journalism” for good reason. All the same he was working from historical sources lost to us today. He is unlikely to have invented the trip. Nor was there reason to believe the postwar cruise any less luxurious, or frantic with entertainments, than the one Shakespeare would ultimately immortalize, still five years in the future. There is better reason to assume Roman historians preferred to remember that journey and forget this one. They made no mention either of Caesar having tarried in Egypt at the war’s conclusion.^* Had they not closed ranks as they did, Shakespeare might well have written Cleopatra into a different play.

There was ample precedent for a Nile trip. It was traditional to welcome a foreign dignitary with a cruise, to introduce him to the marvel that was Egypt. Two generations earlier a high official went to great lengths to ensure that a Roman senator traveling in Egypt be “received with the utmost magnificence,” showered with gifts, entrusted to expert guides, supplied with the pastries and roasted meats with which to feed the sacred crocodiles. Egypt’s miles upon miles of grain fields inevitably impressed, even as they made Roman fingers twitch. And burning curiosity aside, there were legitimate state reasons for the excursion. A new ruler traditionally inaugurated his or her reign with a ceremonial journey south. For Cleopatra this amounted to a proprietary tour of her personal estate. Everyone in Egypt worked for her; nearly every resource of the country—its fields, its game, its trees, the Nile and its crocodiles themselves—was hers. From her point of view the cruise was not so much a pleasure trip or a scientific expedition as a state obligation. With it she provided a critical display of Roman military might to her people, a display of Egyptian abundance to Rome. The people of Egypt had supplied her against her brother when she was vulnerable. With Caesar at her side, she returned to them patently invincible.

To journey from Alexandria south was to leave the Greek-speaking for the Egyptian-speaking world, to travel from wine country to beer country. Here was the culture to which Alexandrians felt themselves superior, where pharaohs were revered and priests held sway. Here Cleopatra’s divinity went unquestioned. Even without the Alexandrian pageantry, the agate and the red granite, the monumental past monumentally displayed, the landscape was a wonder. As a later traveler along the same stretch put it, “I gulped down color, like a donkey gorging on oats.” Cleopatra introduced Caesar to the world’s longest and most spectacular oasis, to the velvety green of the riverbanks, to the hard, black soil of the channel, to the land of red-purple sunsets and amethyst dawns. The two could not have neglected the obligatory stops: the pyramids, which soared above the palms to melt into the haze; the sanctuary and temples of Memphis, where Egypt’s high priest would have been on hand to receive them; the three thousand chambers, above and below ground, of the granite and limestone labyrinth; the lakeside shrine of the crocodile gods, where the beasts had been trained to open their jaws on command, and where Caesar may have been as taken by the system of locks and dams, which had reclaimed farmland; the colossi of Memnon, miraculously white against the pale apricot sand, sixty-eight feet tall and visible for miles around. Up the hill behind them, deep in the rock, lay the tombs of the Valley of the Kings. Farther south came the handsome Temple of Isis, decorated and partly built by Cleopatra’s father, set on an island among the tossing rapids at Philae.^*

More miraculous yet were the accommodations, to which the taste for the colossal extended as well. The idea was to impress as much as to entertain. Cleopatra and Caesar would have left from Lake Mareotis, south of the city, where her pleasure fleet docked. That port could accommodate three-hundred-foot-long royal barges. Their bows were ivory; elaborate colonnades lined the deck, the column shafts of minutely carved cypress. Eighteen-foot gilded statues decorated stern and prow. The ship’s hardware was polished bronze, its woodwork embedded with ivory and gold. All was brilliantly painted, including the shipboard collection of royal statuary, which decorated the two floors of living and entertaining quarters. A coffered ceiling covered one banqueting room. Egyptian-style columns decorated another, carved with acanthus leaves and lotus petals in an alternating black and white pattern. Over a third stretched a purple awning, held aloft by arched beams. It was not unusual for a royal barge to include a gym, a library, shrines to Dionysus and Aphrodite, a garden, a grotto, lecture halls, a spiral staircase, a copper bath, stables, an aquarium.

Theirs was no modest procession. A midlevel bureacrat traveled with an entourage of ten, lost as he was without his secretaries and accountants, his baker, his bath attendants, his doctor, his silver steward, his arms master. Cleopatra and Caesar headed south among a swarm of Roman soldiers and Egyptian courtiers. Hospitality during their stay was incumbent on the people and a daunting assignment, especially if, as Appian asserts, a fleet of four hundred ships followed behind. Certainly a multitude of smaller vessels followed their queen’s, along a river thick with stone and wine carriers, merchant galleys, police skiffs. It was the people’s responsibility to feed and cosset their monarch, to shower gifts upon her, to entertain her retinue, to arrange transportation. This raised all sorts of lodging, security, and provisioning concerns; officials were not above advising subordinates to hide supplies in order to prevent royal requisitioning. That was perfectly reasonable given the demands; one insignificant official called for 372 suckling pigs and 200 sheep. Farmers worked day and night to produce the necessary stores, to ferment beer, stockpile hay, furnish guesthouses, round up donkeys. They did so now in the thick of harvest season. With greater resources and under less complex circumstances, Cicero would be happy to bid Caesar good-bye when he entertained the general and his entourage two years later, at his country estate. He was relieved not to have to ask Caesar to drop by again when next in the neighborhood. “Once is enough,” Cicero sighed, having felt less host than quartermaster.

Up the Nile Cleopatra and Caesar sailed in their “floating palace,” the wind at their backs. On shore the date trees hung thick with fruit, the palm fronds slightly faded. Beyond the river lay a sea of golden grain; in the trees the bananas glinted yellow. The apricots, grapes, figs, and mulberries were nearly ripe. It was peach season; above their heads, the pigeons visibly paired off. Everything about the landscape before Caesar and Cleopatra reinforced