made for an audacious Egyptian queen. (There are signs of confabulation as well as conflation here. Within a matter of years, Cleopatra was said to have worn “the two pearls that were the largest in the whole of history.” Pliny assigned each a value of 420 talents, which meant Cleopatra dangled the equivalent of a Mediterranean villa from each ear. The sum was the same that she had contributed to the burial of the Memphis bull.) Who else could have been so frivolous, so wanton, so ready to enchant a man that she would pluck a pearl from her lobe, dissolve it in vinegar, and swallow it, to beguile a man with magic and excess?* Such was the story that would circulate later about Cleopatra.
Neither the magic nor the excess was likely to have been much on display over the winter of 46. Cleopatra clearly frequented some fashionable addresses, though it was difficult to believe she was not often at home in Caesar’s villa, surrounded solely by her advisers and retainers. Some of those courtiers knew their way around Rome, having lobbied for her father’s notorious restoration. She lived these months in Latin; whatever her proficiency in that language, she discovered that certain concepts did not translate. Even the sense of humor was different, broad and salty in Rome where it was ironic and allusive in Alexandria. Literal-minded, the Romans took themselves seriously. Alexandrian irreverence and exuberance were in scant supply.
When spring rolled around and the sea reopened, Cleopatra may have sailed home, to return to Rome later in the year. Two consecutive visits seem more likely than a single extended one; she could hardly have justified an eighteen-month absence, no matter how confident she felt of her authority in Egypt. That would have entailed a grueling amount of travel, though the southbound trip was a less taxing one. Assuming she returned to Alexandria in 45, she set out in late March or early April, by which time the northeasterly squalls had abated, the thunder and lightning off the coast of Egypt with them. One did not brave the gales in winter. One did so only with trepidation in the spring, once “the leaves at the top of the fig tree are as big as the footprint a crow leaves as it goes.” If Cleopatra indeed sailed home early in 45, she was again in Rome by the fall. Only an interim return to Alexandria makes sense of Suetonius’s account, in which Caesar saw Cleopatra off from Rome. He would not have a second opportunity to do so.
To Suetonius, working from a broad collection of sources if over a century and a half later, the parting was as reluctant as the about-face on the Nile. The Roman commander “did not let her leave until he had laden her with high honours and rich gifts.” He acknowledged Caesarion as his son and “allowed her to give his name to the child.” There was no reason for him to hesitate to do so. At least in 45, Caesar’s plans could only be furthered by an Eastern heir and a living link to Alexander the Great. He was also conceding the obvious. If he had not already begun to do so, two-year-old Caesarion soon enough resembled his father in looks and manner. The acknowledgment may have been the point of the reunion; Caesarion’s recognition was easily worth any number of trips across the Mediterranean. As one historian has it—and as many have noted under similar circumstances before and since—their child “was her best card if she aimed at pinning Caesar down to a previous agreement or promise.” The nature of that promise eludes us, aside from formal recognition as a friend of Rome, which had cost Cleopatra’s father the astounding sum of 6,000 talents.
How else to account for the extended Roman stay or stays? There was too much at stake to subscribe to sentiment over politics. Caesar had summoned Cleopatra once before; his own motives over these eighteen months are among the most probed and least understood in history. It is plausible that the two were planning some kind of future together, as many would conclude, to Caesar’s discredit. At the end of her life Cleopatra had in hand a clutch of passionate, admiring letters from Caesar, at least some of which he must have written to her between 48 and 46. Here was the historical version of that beautiful vase of poisonous snakes. It is possible that Cleopatra felt she needed to press her case personally with Caesar’s colleagues, to confirm that Egypt was to remain a friend and ally of Rome under her rule. The Senate was a less than cohesive body, invested in private agendas and by no means unanimously inclined toward Caesar’s. She knew intimately of its factions; to broaden her base of support abroad was to secure the throne at home. (Cicero’s take on official Rome was less flattering: “A more raffish assemblage never sat down in a low-grade music hall,” he huffed about a jury of his peers.) Cleopatra’s second visit would have coincided with Caesar’s autumn return from Spain in 45, by which time he expected to turn to a reorganization of the East. She could not afford to be left out of that conversation, if only for the sake of Cyprus, which formally belonged to her brother, and which had a tendency to resist her authority. If Cleopatra had greater plans still, they are lost to us today. Certainly it was easy to assign her spectacular, designing motives; Rome was accustomed to scheming Ptolemies. What survives instead is the cost of Cleopatra’s reunion with Caesar. It was ruinous. While she may have spent her days as quietly as Homer’s Penelope, she wound up more like a calamity-causing Helen of Troy. This was to be her illogical adventure.
V
MAN IS BY NATURE A POLITICAL CREATURE
—EURIPIDES
“I DON’T KNOW how a man of any sense
When Caesar returned from Spain that fall he had annihilated the surviving Pompeians. The civil war was, Caesar announced, finally over. He settled in Rome for what was to be his longest uninterrupted stay in fourteen years. Whether it was conducted circumspectly or not, he and Cleopatra continued their affair. To many her reasons for being in Rome may have been as opaque as they are to us. She had experience with unpopularity; it would have come in handy now. She lived at a less than desirable address, on a slippery grade between superiority and slight. At the same time, it is impossible to believe that she failed to elicit brisk curiosity, if not starry-eyed admiration. She presumably continued her father’s generous gift-giving tradition; he had handed out lavish bribes and incurred great debts, equally fine reasons to seek out his daughter. She was intellectually agile, which always impressed Romans.
Fashion paused to acknowledge her presence; Cleopatra set off a brief vogue for an elaborate hairstyle, in which rows of braids were knotted cornrow-style and caught in a bun behind the head. Rome was moreover a stratified, status-obsessed society. Rank mattered; learning mattered; money mattered. Cleopatra was a member of the elite, to whom the social mores were familiar. So far as the conversation went, a sophisticated Roman dinner was little different from a sophisticated Alexandrian dinner. A subtle and clever guest, Cleopatra would have warmed to the political gossip and to the kind of learned, leisurely discourse prized in Rome, the brand of talk that was said to improve the wine. In the definition of an erudite contemporary, the ideal dinner companion was “neither a chatterbox nor a mute.” Over the course of several late afternoon hours, he discoursed fluently on a variety of political, scientific, and artistic subjects, taking aim at the eternal questions: What came first, the chicken or the egg? Why does distance vision improve with age? Why do Jews shun pork? Cleopatra had Caesar’s favor; she could
