the myths of Egypt’s abundance and the river’s magical faculties. Renowned throughout the ancient world, the Nile was said to flow with gold; extraordinary powers were ascribed to it. Its water was believed to boil at half the temperature of other waters. Its river creatures attained staggering proportions. Ptolemy II had sent his daughter cases of Nile water when she married into the Syrian royal family, to ensure her fertility. (She was already thirty. It worked.) Egyptian women were known for more efficient pregnancies; it took them less time to produce a baby. They were said as well to have an elevated rate of giving birth to twins, often quadruplets. Goats—which bore two kids elsewhere—were said to bear five in Egypt, pigeons to produce twelve broods rather than ten. The male skull was thought to be stronger in Egypt, where baldness (and comb-overs like Caesar’s) were rare. The Nile was believed to have spontaneously generated life; one thing Cleopatra and Caesar did not see were the river creatures of legend, half-mice, half-dirt. Nor presumably did they find serpents with grass sprouting on their backs, or people who lived under turtle shells the size of boats. What they did make out among the tufted papyrus thickets and the lotus plants were herons and storks, hippopotami and eighteen-foot-long crocodiles, an inexhaustible supply of fish, a rarity in Rome. The ancient historians were mistaken about the primordial details, wholly accurate on the subject of Egypt’s fecundity. Cleopatra’s home was the most productive agricultural land in the Mediterranean, the one in which crops appeared to plant and water themselves.
That had been true since time immemorial, an expression that in Egypt actually meant something. Even in Cleopatra’s day there was such a thing as ancient history; somehow the world was older then, thick with legend, swathed in superstition. At her side Caesar could have marveled at twenty-eight centuries of architecture. Already visitors had burgled—and scrawled graffiti over—the tombs in the Valley of the Kings.* Already by the spring of 47 one of the seven wonders of the world lay in ruins. Cleopatra’s country had been in the hospitality business long before the rest of the world so much as suspected gracious living existed. At the same time, the centuries felt closer than they do to us today. Alexander the Great was further from Cleopatra than 1776 is to our century, yet Alexander remained always vividly, urgently present. While 1,120 years separated Cleopatra from the greatest story of her time, the fall of Troy remained a steadfast point of reference. The past was at all times within reach, a nearly religious awe aimed in its direction. This was especially true in Egypt, which had a passion for history, and which for two millennia already had kept a written record. For the bulk of those years the insular, inaccessible country had changed little, its art barely at all. There was good reason why Cleopatra’s subjects viewed time as a coil of endless repetitions. Recent events only reinforced that notion. Ptolemaic advisers had persuaded earlier boy-kings to murder their immediate families. Previous queens had fled Egypt to muster armies. Much that could be said of the conquering Romans in 47 could have been said three centuries earlier of Cleopatra’s Macedonian ancestors, a parallel by no means lost on her.
In white linen and a diadem, Cleopatra took part throughout the trip in religious rituals that were themselves thousands of years old. She styled herself every bit the living divinity; we do not know how her people displayed their obeisance, but they likely bowed in her presence or raised a hand in some form of salute. To those who lined up for a view, on shore and along the causeways, Caesar and Cleopatra represented not a romance but a sort of magical apparition from another world, the earthly visitation of two living gods. They made for quite a sight: the fair-haired, broad-shouldered Roman, a study in hollows and sinews, in his long purple mantle, with the dark, small-boned queen of Egypt at his side. Together they visited sacred sites, the monuments of ancient kings, the secondary palaces along the river. Together they were greeted by white-robed priests and cheering crowds. Together they sailed among farmsteads, across a landscape dotted with mud-brick towers and red terraced roofs, past luxuriant orchards and vineyards and golden fields, sphinxes half buried in sand, cliffs of rock-cut tombs. Together they battled the gnats, a seasonal gift of the low river. From a distance they announced themselves with a clatter of oars and the strumming of lyres. In their wake the bite of incense lingered in the sultry air.
Certainly the trip was a vacation compared to the weeks that had preceded it. That it was a debauched pleasure cruise, a lark, a honeymoon, was probably an idea generated by the lavish accommodations. A Roman needed look no further for depravity; by definition the Latin tongue encountered something rotten when it met the word “luxury,” which derives from the verb “to dislocate,” and which spent thousands of years conjoined with “lascivious.” According to Appian, Caesar journeyed up the Nile with Cleopatra “and enjoyed himself with her in other ways as well.” From there it was no great leap to the charge that Cleopatra had borne the Roman general off on this folly, one of her design, into the exotic heart of an exotic country, from which he had forcibly to be torn. Cleopatra—or Egypt—tended to have this effect on poor, vulnerable Romans. Her country was itself a tease and a temptation. The itinerary was presumably planned in advance and adhered to, but would not be remembered that way. By later accounts Caesar was reluctant to leave, Cleopatra reluctant to let him go. “She would have detained him even longer in Egypt or else would have set out with him at once for Rome,” was Dio’s take. Only against his will did Caesar’s men coax him back. In Suetonius’s version, Caesar has so lost his head over the Egyptian queen that he would have followed her to the Ethiopian frontier had his soldiers not threatened to mutiny. They got their way finally between the rugged cliffs south of modern-day Aswan, where the procession effected an unwieldy about-face.
Dio has Caesar waking slowly to the realization that a delay in Egypt “was neither creditable nor profitable to him” but omits any context for the lull on the river. Caesar had at the time no living children. Nor in the course of three marriages had he fathered a son. On that count Egypt upheld its legendary reputation. In swelling tribute to the fecundity of her land, the one in which flowers bloomed perpetually and wheat harvested itself, Cleopatra was that spring in her last months of pregnancy. She roundly confirmed the myth of the propagative powers of her magnificent country. The two spent somewhere between three and nine weeks on the river and turned back at the first cataract of the Nile. The current carried them gently back to the palace. From Alexandria Caesar set off for Armenia, then in a state of revolt. Late in June Cleopatra gave birth to a half-Roman child, divine on two counts, once as a Ptolemy, again as a Caesar. Here at last was something new under the sun.
IV
THE GOLDEN AGE NEVER WAS THE PRESENT AGE
—EURIPIDES
CAESAR LEFT EGYPT on June 10, far later than he should have. Rome had been without word from him since December and was in turmoil, as he surely knew. The mails worked perfectly well. In what was as much a personal as a political favor, he took Cleopatra’s sister—still a “sibling-loving god” in name if not demeanor—with him as a prisoner of war. To protect Cleopatra, 12,000 of the legionnaires who had followed Caesar remained in Egypt, again a gesture both personal and political. Civil unrest was in neither of their best interests. Caesar indeed appears to have been disinclined to leave Cleopatra, although it is implausible that she proposed accompanying him to Rome that summer, as Dio claims. There was almost certainly talk of a reunion before the departure, which Caesar seems to have delayed and delayed until he could do so no longer.
Two weeks later Cleopatra went into labor. We know as little of the actual birth as we do of the intimacy that preceded it.* With or without a birthing stool, a team of midwives would have stood at the ready. One received the child in a bundle of cloth, securely swaddling him. A second cut the umbilical cord with an obsidian blade. The newborn was to be amply filled with milk, to which end a royal wet nurse was engaged. The requirements for the job were no different from those for a sitter today: The nurse should be congenial and clean. She should “not be prone to anger, not talkative nor indifferent in the taking of food, but organized and sensible.” Ideally, she should also be Greek, which was to say educated. Typically she was the lucky wife of a court official; hers was a well-remunerated, prestigious post, several years in duration. To it she brought generations’ worth of
