general home at the end of a day’s festivities, a parade of revelers and musicians trailing behind. Nor had Rome ever seen banquets of delicacies and fine wines for 66,000 people.
Cleopatra may have already been installed in Caesar’s villa by late summer, when he celebrated his Egyptian triumph. Trumpets heralded his approach that morning; in his purple tunic, a wreath of laurels on his bald head, he rode through the city gates in a chariot drawn by four white horses. The crowd greeted him with rose petals and applause. His exultant men marched beside him in metal-plated tunics, chanting both victory odes and obscenities about the romantic conquests abroad. In their raillery Cleopatra’s name figured as a punch line, a charge that Caesar in no way denied. By tradition, the procession included the spoils of the campaign and representations of the vanquished; from the Campus Martius in the north to the Via Sacra, through the Circus Maximus and up the Capitoline Hill, rode effigies of Achillas and Pothinus, along with outsize paintings of the Nile and a model of the lighthouse of Alexandria. The crowds roared with approval. The Egyptian float was itself plated with glossy tortoiseshell, a material new to Rome and one that supported Caesar’s boasts about the riches he had acquired abroad. Each of the triumphs included feasts and public performances; athletic contests, stage plays, horse races, musical competitions, displays of wild animals, circus feats, and gladiatorial fights took place all over the city. For three weeks Rome was a thief’s paradise, as houses emptied for the spectacle. After the Egyptian triumph came a mock sea battle, for which an artificial lake was engineered. That match featured four thousand rowers and some of the defeated Egyptian ships, which Suetonius would have us believe Caesar towed across the Mediterranean for the occasion.
Certainly Cleopatra did not need to be on hand when Caesar assured the people of the bounties on which Rome might draw abroad, as good an explanation as any for his Egyptian interlude. They exulted in his largesse, which was properly hers. Caesar’s soldiers and officers made out handsomely. On every citizen Caesar also bestowed 400 sesterces—the equivalent of more than three months’ wages—along with gifts of wheat and olive oil. It is even less likely that Cleopatra would have wished to have been on hand for the Egyptian triumph, a reminder that she was not the only Ptolemaic woman in Rome. Each of the processions ended with a multitude of human captives. (So crucial were they that at an earlier triumph Pompey had appropriated prisoners that did not belong to him. Their number quantified a general’s success.) The more exotic the prisoner the better; Caesar’s African procession—the last of the performances of 46—included the five-year-old African prince who, in an odd twist of events, was to marry Cleopatra’s daughter.* In his Egyptian procession Caesar included another novelty, though one to which the Romans did not thrill as they did to the miniature African prince or the exotic “cameleopard.” Wrapped in golden shackles, Cleopatra’s teenaged sister, Arsinoe, rode through the streets. Behind her followed the spoils and the prisoners of the Egyptian campaign. Intended to impress, this unusual piece of booty instead disturbed the crowd. Arsinoe proved too much for her audience, unaccustomed, Dio tells us, to the sight of “a woman and once considered a queen, in chains—a spectacle which had never yet been seen, at least in Rome.” Awe curdled to compassion. Tears sprang to eyes. Arsinoe drove home the human cost of the war, which had affected nearly every family. Even if Cleopatra remained pitiless on her sister’s account, even if she preferred to read Caesar’s victory as one over a previous administration, she had little to gain from this brutal reminder of Egypt’s subjugation. She had narrowly escaped the same disgrace.
As it happened, glamorous guests were as problematic as glamorous prisoners. It is difficult to say which Ptolemy ultimately caused the Romans the greater discomfort: the royal prisoner whom Caesar degraded in the streets, or the foreign queen with whom he consorted at his villa. Soon enough Arsinoe would be banished, dispatched across the Aegean to the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, a gleaming, white marble wonder of the world. Her older sister spent the winter on the less fashionable side of the Tiber. She was without word from Alexandria, as the sailing season was over, to reopen only in March. She would be for some time too without Caesar, who left Rome abruptly, early in November. He was off to Spain, for a final campaign against the Pompeians. Cleopatra had known difficult postings before—the desert of the western Sinai comes most readily to mind—but for all the beauty of the Janiculum villa and its panoramic view, this one was less than comfortable. Her welcome was not universally cordial. Rome was chilly, and wet. Latin did not come easily to a Greek speaker; Cleopatra was at a linguistic disadvantage. And in a city where women enjoyed the same legal rights as infants or chickens, the posting called upon a whole new set of skills. For good reason 46 may have felt to Cleopatra like the longest year in history, as— on account of the attenuated calendar—indeed it was.
CLEOPATRA HAD IN Rome the problem of any celebrity abroad: she knew few people, but everyone knew her. Her presence loomed large, only partly on account of Calpurnia, no stranger to such affronts. Caesar had married his third wife in 59 and spent the intervening years delivering up infidelities, from across town as ably as from abroad. He was himself never above suspicion. He had slept with most of his colleagues’ wives, in one case with both a very beautiful mother and her young daughter, whom he had the good taste to seduce sequentially. Between his departure from Alexandria and the return to Rome he had found time even for a dalliance with the wife of the king of Mauretania, an affair to which some—in a swoon of romantic logic—have ascribed Cleopatra’s visit. To compete with a wife was one thing. To compete with another Eastern sovereign, even one of lesser import, quite another. (This puts a more emotional spin on the matter than either the era or the evidence allows.) More problematic was Caesar’s marked affection for a woman who stood so far outside of, and on many fronts in opposition to, the mores of Rome.
While little about Cleopatra evoked affection abroad, all elicited curiosity. This would have imposed certain restrictions on her movements. It is difficult to believe she appeared often in unmannerly Rome. More likely Caesar visited her in his villa, which he could not have done discreetly. Ptolemies had been Roman houseguests before— Auletes had lodged with Pompey—but the relationship was dissimilar. It was next to impossible for either Caesar or Cleopatra to have done anything secretly; a curtained litter hurtled through the streets by a team of burly Syrians tended to attract attention. (Auletes had traveled about on the shoulders of eight men and with an escort of a hundred swordsmen. There is little reason to believe that his daughter interpreted pomp differently. Certainly she moved about Rome only with bodyguards, advisers, and attendants.) A great man did not travel without his scarlet cloak and retinue; by late 45, Caesar had moreover taken to parading about in red calf-high boots. And by all accounts Rome was a city in which the stones themselves seemed to talk. As Juvenal reminds us, a wealthy Roman deluded himself if he believed in secrets. “Even if his slaves keep quiet, his horses will talk and so will his dog and his doorposts and his marble floors.” You could take every possible precaution: “All the same, what the master does at the second cock-crow will be known to the nearest shopkeeper before dawn, along with all the fictions of the pastry cook, the head chefs, and the carvers.” Fortunately Cleopatra had little reason to cover her tracks. Nighttime escapades in canvas bags figured nowhere on her agenda.
Caesar made at least one very public attempt to integrate the queen of Egypt into Roman life. In September he dedicated an ornate temple in his Forum to Venus Genetrix, the goddess from whom he claimed descent and to whom he ascribed his victories, as well as the divine mother of the Roman people. Caesar was said to be “absolutely devoted” to Venus, eager to persuade his colleagues “that he had received from her a kind of bloom of youth,” no doubt all the more so as his cheeks hollowed, the skin pouched under his eyes, and his hairline vanished entirely. In his favorite temple, at what was essentially his business address, he installed a gold, life-size statue of Cleopatra beside Venus. It was a signal honor, the more so as Caesar had not yet erected a statue of himself. The tribute made some sense; to the Roman mind, Isis and Venus were, in their maternal roles, closely allied. As homages went, it was also excessive and perplexing, an unprecedented step beyond what was required of Caesar if Cleopatra had come, as Dio maintains, for official recognition “among the friends and allies of the Roman people.” That diplomatic formula mattered—it had been worth its weight in Auletes’ gold—but had not previously entailed costly statues of foreign monarchs at sacred addresses in the heart of Rome. It struck an odd chord in a city where humans did not traditionally mingle among cult images.
Cleopatra may or may not have fully grasped the irregularity of Caesar’s tribute; gold statues were not new to her. She would in his villa have acutely felt the oddities of the situation. The very palette of Rome was different. She was accustomed to ocean views, invigorating sea breezes, to sparkling white walls and a cloudless Alexandrian sky. There was no glinting turquoise Mediterranean out her window, no purple light at the end of the day. Nor was there any rapturous architecture. Rome was monochromatic next to the blaze of color to which Cleopatra was accustomed. All was wood and plaster. Music pervaded every aspect of Alexandrian life, where the flutes and lyres, rattles and drums, were everywhere. Only reluctantly did the Romans admit such frivolities to their culture. One
