apologized for one’s ability to dance or play the flute well. “No one dances while he is sober,” offered Cicero, the greatest of Roman killjoys, “unless he happens to be a lunatic.”*
If she spent any time in the thick of the city, Cleopatra found herself amid a gloomy welter of crooked, congested streets, with no main avenue and no central plan, among muddy pigs and soup vendors and artisans’ shops that tumbled out onto footways. By every measure a less salubrious city than Alexandria, Rome was squalid and shapeless, an oriental tangle of narrow, poorly ventilated streets and ceaseless, shutter-creaking commotion, perpetually in shadow, stiflingly hot in summer. Isolated though Cleopatra was on her wooded hill, there were advantages too in Caesar’s address. She was at a remove from the incessant hawking and haggling, the pounding of blacksmiths and the hammering of stonemasons, the rattling of chains and squeaking of hoists below. Rome was a city of nonstop construction, as homes collapsed or were torn down regularly. To ease the racket Caesar had curtailed daytime traffic in the streets, with the predictable result: “You have to be a very rich man to get sleep in Rome,” asserted Juvenal, who cursed the evening stampede, and felt he risked his life each time he set foot outside. To be trampled by litters or splattered with mud constituted peripheral dangers. Pedestrians routinely crumpled into hidden hollows. Every window represented a potential assault. Given the frequency with which pots propelled themselves from ledges, the smart man, warned Juvenal, went to dinner only after having made his will. Cleopatra had any number of reasons to yearn for what a Latin poet would later term her “superficially civilized country.”
At the time of her visit Rome had only just discovered urban design, another Eastern import. You would search in vain for the famous landmarks; the Coliseum, “the last word in amphitheatres,” had not yet been built. Nor were the Pantheon or the Baths of Caracalla. Pompey’s theater had been Rome’s only structure of distinction; it had inspired Caesar’s Forum, which now eclipsed it. Rome remained provincial, but increasingly aware of itself as such. Greece continued to spell culture, elegance, art. If you wanted a secretary, a doctor, an animal trainer, a craftsman, you wanted a Greek. And if you wanted a bookstore, you dearly hoped to find yourself in Alexandria. It was difficult to get a decent copy of anything in Rome, which nursed a healthy inferiority complex as a result. It manifested itself the time-honored way: The Roman waxed superior. His was hardly the first civilization merrily to impugn the one it aspired to be. So the pyramids—marvels of engineering and of ancient exactitude, constructed with primitive tools and equally primitive arithmetic—could be reduced to “idle and foolish ostentations of royal wealth.” Gulping down his envy with a bracing chaser of contempt, a Roman in Egypt found himself less awed than offended. He wrote off extravagance as detrimental to body and mind, sounding like no one so much as Mark Twain resisting the siren call of Europe. Staring an advanced civilization straight in the face, the Roman reduced it either to barbarism or decadence. He took refuge in the hard edges and right angles of his own language, even while— sniffing and scorning—he acknowledged it to be inferior to the sinuous, supple, all-accommodating Greek tongue. Latin kept its speaker on the straight and narrow. Regrettably, there was no word in that language for “not possessing.” But neither, blessedly, was there a Latin term for “gold-inlay utensils” or “engraved glasses from the warm Nile.”
With Caesar’s overseas campaigns, with Rome’s rising might and fortune, the splendors of the Greek world began to penetrate the Italian peninsula. It would be difficult to overstate the ramifications of those imports for Cleopatra. Pompey had only just introduced ebony to Rome. Myrrh and cinnamon, ginger and pepper, were newly arrived. For the first time, decorative pillars graced the entries of private homes. Only one house in Rome sported marble-paneled walls, although in a few years that home would be rivaled by a hundred others. The culinary arts flourished, as turbot, stork, and peacock found their place on tables. During Cleopatra’s stay the relative virtues of mantis prawns versus African snails were vigorously debated. Hers was a Rome in transition; there were both luxurious entertainments and those who stole the fine linen napkins. Latin literature was in its infancy and Greek literature soon to be discounted, written off—the metaphor was apt—as a beautiful vase full of poisonous snakes. The beauty of a toga—that plain, natural wool garment, as uncomfortable as it was impractical—was, like the Latin language itself, in the constraints. At his entertainments Caesar arranged for silk awnings, to shade the spectators along the Via Sacra and up the Capitoline Hill. As Alexandrian imports, those awnings automatically qualified as “a barbarian luxury.”
With the nouveau riche embrace of the East came those who parsed each import and read in it the end of civilization, the road to degeneracy. To that end Caesar reenacted the city’s long-neglected sumptuary laws, designed to curb private expenditures. He was strict on this count as only a lover of magnificence—as the first host in history to offer his guests a selection of four fine wines—can be. He dispatched agents to confiscate delicacies in the market, to confiscate ornate tableware, midmeal, in private homes. With few exceptions, he prohibited litters, scarlet garments, pearls. To anyone accustomed to Alexandria, the fashion capital of the world, the idea that Caesar’s Rome needed sumptuary laws was laughable. A woman who knew when it was time to downgrade her dinnerware could be trusted to dress appropriately, however; Cleopatra may have toned down the wardrobe. A Roman matron wore white, where the Alexandrian woman relished color. And a woman who could calibrate her humor for different audiences knew better than to scorn a dinner that in no way rivaled her fare at home. As has been observed over the millennia, luxury is more easily denounced than denied; Caesar’s edict was more popular with some than others. It won few points from Cicero, who weaned himself with difficulty that winter from peacock, giant oysters, and saltwater eel. (Peacock meat was notoriously tough, but that was not the point.) Oysters and eels, Cicero moaned, had never offended his digestive system as did turnips.
What Cleopatra thought of the puritans—real and purported—among whom she found herself we do not know. We know well what they thought of her. Marriage, and women, were done differently in Rome, where female authority was a meaningless concept. (Similarly, for a man to be called effeminate was the worst insult.) The Roman definition of a good woman was an inconspicuous woman, something that defied Cleopatra’s training. In Alexandria she needed to make a spectacle of herself. Here the mandate was reversed. Not only was a Roman woman without political or legal rights, but she was without a personal name; she carried only the one derived from her father. Caesar had two sisters, both named Julia. Roman women cast their eyes down in public, where they were silent and recessive. They did not issue the dinner invitations. They were invisible in intellectual life, represented less often in art than they were in Egypt, where female workers and female pharaohs appear in painting and sculpture, in tomb scenes and on chapel walls, trapping birds, selling goods, or making offerings to the gods.
For a foreign sovereign the rules—like the sumptuary laws—did not entirely apply, but Cleopatra could not have felt at her ease.* As always, what kept women pure was the drudge’s life. ( Juvenal supplied the traditional formula: “Hard work, short sleep, hands chafed and hardened” from housework.) As a marriage crasher who had somehow hustled herself into Venus’s exalted company, Cleopatra unsettled Rome on any number of counts: she was female and foreign, an Eastern monarch in what still believed itself to be a king-crushing republic, a stand-in for Isis, whose cult was suspect and subversive and whose temples were notorious spots for assignations. Cleopatra confused the categories and flouted convention. Even by modern standards, she posed problems of protocol. If she was the mistress of a Roman dictator, was she mistress of the Roman world as well? No matter how she comported herself—at all times she seems to have been as deft with her image as her person —she broke every rule in the book. A queen at home, she was a courtesan out of her country. And she was something more dangerous still: a courtesan with means. Cleopatra was not merely economically independent, but richer than any man in Rome.
Her very wealth—the same wealth that had fed Rome during the triumphs—impugned her morals. To wax eloquent on someone’s embossed silver, his sumptuous carpets, his marble statuary, was to indict him. The implications were greater for the lesser sex. “There’s nothing a woman doesn’t allow herself, nothing she considers disgusting, once she has put an emerald choker around her neck and has fastened giant pearls to her elongated ears,” went the logic. In that respect the length of her ears would do more to seal Cleopatra’s fate than that of her nose.* Even assuming she had left her best jewelry in Alexandria, she was synonymous in Rome with the “reckless extravagance” of that world. It was no less than her birthright. (A proper Roman woman considered her children her jewels.) By Roman standards, even Cleopatra’s eunuchs were rich. This meant that every unpardonable evil in the profligacy family attached itself to her. Well before she became the sorceress of legend—a reckless, careless destroyer of men—she was suspect as an extravagant Easterner, a reckless, careless destroyer of wealth. If moral turpitude began with shellfish and metastasized into purple and scarlet robes, it found its ostentatious apogee in pearls, which topped the extravagance scale in Rome. Suetonius invoked them to prove Caesar’s weakness for luxury. The story of the libertine who sacrificed a pearl to make his point was an oft-told tale, on the books long before 46 and fated to stay there, to indict others, long after. It seemed, however, tailor-
