quantities of wheat, oil, and salt unless the river fell beneath a certain level, at which point she was to do his housekeeping. Many temples had Nilotic measuring columns, monitored secretly and obsessively by their priests. Daily they compared those figures to the previous year’s. From them Cleopatra’s officials could assess harvests and calculate taxes. Given the mania for measures and comparative data, it makes sense that geometry came of age in Egypt.
The fixation on past performances accounted for the embrace of history as well, although that discipline was less exact. Feeding the people was paramount, a mandate on which Cleopatra prided herself. She depicted herself as the Lady of Abundance for good reason; she stood between her subjects and hunger. Given the rigors of the system, they could manage no reserves. In a crisis Cleopatra had no choice but to authorize distributions from crown warehouses. “There was no famine during my reign” was a popular and gratifying phrase for a monarch to inscribe on his or her temples. Ancient propaganda served the same ends as its modern counterpart, however. There appears to have been little correlation between the alimentary reality and that sunny assertion, as often as not patently false.
BY THE MIDDLE of 47 Cleopatra was free of conspiring court officials and relieved of all antagonistic family members. Civil disturbance was at a minimum. She had her hands full all the same. “Anyone familiar with the wearying work required of kings by all those letters they must read or write would not bother even to pick up a diadem from the ground,” an earlier Hellenistic monarch had groaned. And he had no experience of lush Ptolemaic bureaucracy, the natural fruit of an administration-proud, papyrus-rich culture with a planned and centralized economy and an unaccountable passion for records and censuses. The Greek historian Diodorus outlined another first-century sovereign’s schedule, some version of which would have been Cleopatra’s as well. After being awakened, she waded through sheafs of dispatches from every quarter. Her advisers briefed her on affairs of state. She corresponded with high priests and fellow sovereigns. If they were well, if their public and private affairs proceeded satisfactorily, then—went the formulaic greeting—she was well. She handed down decisions. She dictated memorandums to various scribes and signed off—sometimes with a single, powerful word meaning, “Let it be done”—on others. Only later was she bathed and dressed, perfumed and made up, after which she offered smoky sacrifices to the gods. At some appointed afternoon hour she received callers, on state, temple, and judicial business. Those audiences could be stultifying; they had lulled an earlier Ptolemy to sleep. Cleopatra’s responsibilities very nearly rivaled those of Isis: She not only dispensed justice, commanded the army and navy, regulated the economy, negotiated with foreign powers, and presided over the temples, but determined the prices of raw materials and supervised the sowing schedules, the distribution of seed, the condition of Egypt’s canals, the food supply. She was magistrate, high priest, queen, and goddess. She was also—on a day-to-day basis and far more frequently—chief executive officer. She headed both the secular and the religious bureaucracies. She was Egypt’s merchant in chief. The crush of state business consumed most of her day. And as that early, weary Hellenistic monarch had acknowledged, absolute power consumes absolutely.
A vast, entrenched bureaucracy answered to Cleopatra. On the local level regional clerks and subclerks, village heads, scribes, tax collectors, and police did her bidding. On the national level a chief finance and interior minister, her
The administration made for a cumbersome, many-levered piece of machinery. It was founded on two assumptions. It was Cleopatra’s role to tax the people, the people’s role to fill her coffers. To that end her forebears had inserted controls into every level of every industry; a larger skein of governmental red tape was nowhere to be found. (Caesar could only have been astonished. Rome was at the time bureaucracy-free.) Cleopatra’s harvests were the greatest in the Mediterranean world. With them she fed her people, and from them she derived her power. Her officials consequently monitored their every aspect. They distributed the seed. Its equivalent was to be returned at harvesttime. The farmer took a royal oath to do what he said he would do with his planting. You filled your ship only after swearing that you would deliver your goods “unadultered and without delay.” Under Cleopatra and as a consequence of the decades of unrest, shippers traveled with sealed samples, in the company of armed guards. A good-sized Ptolemaic vessel could carry three hundred tons of wheat down the river. At least two such ships made the trip daily—with wheat, barley, lentils—to feed Alexandria alone.
The same punctilious oversight extended to every corner of the economy. The Ptolemaic system has been compared to that of Soviet Russia; it stands among the most closely controlled economies in history. No matter who farmed it—Egyptian peasant, Greek settler, temple priest—most land was royal land. As such Cleopatra’s functionaries determined and monitored its use. Only with government permission could you fell a tree, breed pigs, turn your barley field into an olive garden. All was scrupulously designed for the sake of the record-keeping, profit- surveying bureaucrat rather than for the convenience of the cultivator or the benefit of the crop. You faced prosecution (as did one overly enterprising woman) if you planted palms without permission. The beekeeper could not move his hives from one administrative district to another, as doing so confused the authorities. No one left his village during the agricultural season. Neither did his farm animals. All land was surveyed, all livestock inventoried, the latter at the height of the flood season, when it could not be hidden. Looms were checked to make sure that none was idle and thread counts correct. It was illegal for a private individual to own an oil press or anything resembling one. Officials spent a great deal of time shutting down clandestine operations. (Temples alone were exempt from this rule for two months of every year, at the end of which they, too, were shut down.) The brewer operated only with a license and received his barley—from which he pledged to make beer—from the state. Once he had sold his goods he submitted his profits to the crown, which deducted the costs of raw materials and rents from his income. Cleopatra was thereby assured both of a market for her barley and of profits on the brewer’s sales. Her officials audited all revenues carefully, to verify that the mulberries and willows and acacia were planted at the proper time, to survey the maintenance of every canal. In the process, they were especially and frequently exhorted to disseminate throughout Egypt the reassuring message that “nobody is allowed to do what he wishes, but that everything is arranged for the best.”
Unparalleled in its sophistication, the system was hugely effective and, for Cleopatra, hugely lucrative. The greatest of Egypt’s industries—wheat, glass, papyrus, linen, oils, and unguents—essentially constituted royal monopolies. On those commodities Cleopatra profited doubly. The sale of oil to the crown was taxed at nearly 50 percent. Cleopatra then resold the oil at a profit, in some cases as great as 300 percent. Cleopatra’s subjects paid a salt tax, a dike tax, a pasture tax; generally if an item could be named, it was taxed. Owners of baths, which were private concerns, owed the state a third of their revenue. Professional fishermen surrendered 25 percent of their catch, vintners 16 percent of their tonnage. Cleopatra operated several wool and textile factories of her own, with a staff of slave girls. She must have seemed divine in her omniscience. A Ptolemy “knew each day what each of his subjects was worth and what most of them were doing.”
It was a system that called out for abuse, which call was answered. Ptolemaic fiscal policy occupied a vast hierarchy of people, from the
