under the weight of which Caesar would finally be buried. To complicate matters, Caesar busied himself that winter with a new and supremely ambitious campaign, one that promised to leave Rome again in the lurch. He set his sights on the conquest of Parthia, a nation that stood at Rome’s eastern frontier and that had long resisted its hegemony. The prospect was one guaranteed later to make Cleopatra groan, if it did not do so already. Though in disintegrating health and a fatalistic frame of mind, Caesar planned to clear Rome’s way to India. He was fifty-five years old, intent on a mission that would consume at least three years. It was the one at which Alexander the Great had nearly succeeded. Cicero doubted that Caesar would return were he actually to head off.
In the spring of 44 he sent sixteen legions and a sizeable cavalry ahead to Parthia, announcing a departure date of March 18. He made arrangements for his absence—presumably Cleopatra did too, and began to pack—but fears and doubts ricocheted around town. When would domestic issues be resolved? How would Rome survive without Caesar? That concern was legitimate, given the mixed performance Mark Antony had turned in during Caesar’s time in Egypt. His appointed deputy, Antony had been unreliable and ineffective. He had established a reputation for profligacy. For those who wondered primarily when Caesar would restore the Republic, an oracle of the winter was particularly unwelcome. A prophecy either materialized or was said to, asserting that Parthia could be conquered only by a king. Word had it that the title was to be conferred imminently on Caesar. That may have been little more than a rumor—oracles were nothing if not convenient—but it spoke to the thorny question of why Cleopatra was living in Caesar’s villa in the first place. Caesar may have had monarchical ambitions. Or he may not have. Certainly he was carelessly out of touch with Rome, less focused on domestic affairs than was wise, autocratic where he should have been solicitous. If one prefers not to be perceived as a king, one is ill advised, for starters, to spend one’s time consorting with a queen.
UNTIL 44 BC, the Ides of March were best known as a springtime frolic, an occasion for serious drinking, like so many others on the Roman calendar. A celebration of the ancient goddess of ends and beginnings, the Ides amounted to a sort of raucous, reeling New Year’s. Bands of revelers picnicked into the night along the banks of the Tiber, where they camped in makeshift huts under a full moon. It was a festival often indelibly recalled nine months later. In 44 the day dawned overcast; toward the end of the cloudy morning, Caesar set off by litter for the Senate, to finalize arrangements for his absence. The young and distinguished Publius Cornelius Dolabella hoped to be named consul in his place, as did Mark Antony, Dolabella’s rival in Caesar’s affections. The Senate assembled that day in one of the large chambers adjoining Pompey’s theater. All rose as Caesar entered, a laurel wreath on his head; at about eleven o’clock, he settled into his new golden chair. He was quickly surrounded by colleagues, many of them devoted friends. One extended a petition, which occasioned a flurry of importuning and kissing of hands. Caesar moved to dismiss the request, at which his petitioner—interrupting him in midsentence—reached out to yank Caesar’s toga roughly from his shoulder. It was the predetermined signal. With it the group closed in, baring daggers. Caesar twisted away from the initial knife, which only grazed him, but found himself powerless against the rain of blows that followed. Every conspirator had agreed to participate in the attack and did so, stabbing wildly at Caesar’s face, his thighs, his chest, and, occasionally, at one another. Caesar attempted to wrestle away, turning his sinewy neck “from one to another of them with furious cries like a wild beast.” He managed finally to emit a single groan and to muffle his face in the fabric of his robe—precisely as Pompey had done off the coast of Egypt— before sinking to the floor.
By the time his assailants rushed to the chamber doors, Caesar lay crumpled on the ground in a soggy purple heap, skewered twenty-three times, his clothing “bloodstained and cut to ribbons.” Their togas and senatorial shoes splattered in blood, the murderers fled in different directions, shouting that they had slain a king and tyrant. Terror and confusion swelled in their wake. In the uproar some assumed the entire Senate to be involved. A crowd that had been transfixed by a holiday gladiatorial contest emptied into the street; word flew around that gladiators were slaughtering senators. Others believed an army was at hand, prepared to pillage the city. “Run! Bolt doors! Bolt doors!” went the cries, as shutters slammed shut and Rome retreated behind lock and key, at homes and in workshops. Pandemonium yielded abruptly to paralysis: one minute “the whole place was full of people running and shouting,” while the next “the city looked as if it had been occupied by an enemy.” In the meeting hall Caesar’s body lay alone and untended for several hours, drenched in blood. No one dared touch it. Only late in the afternoon did three slave boys carry it away, amid hysterical weeping and mourning, from doorways and rooftops.
With the possible exception of Calpurnia, to whom the mutilated corpse was delivered, it is unlikely that the news affected anyone as profoundly as Cleopatra. No matter how it registered on a personal level, Caesar’s death represented a catastrophic political blow. She had lost her champion. Her situation was now insecure at best. The anxiety was great. Were his friends and relatives also to be murdered? Certainly Mark Antony—by rank the next in command—assumed so. Disguised as a servant, he went into hiding. When he resurfaced it was with a breastplate under his tunic. Those involved in the attack changed their clothes and vanished, as did their defenders. (Cicero approved of the murder but played no part in it. He fled as well.) Given Caesar’s anticipated departure, Cleopatra may well have been on the verge of leaving Rome by mid-March. She could by no means have anticipated this finale, however. For years there had been whispers of conspiracies against Caesar, talk that well predated her stay. As for the catalogue of portents, they are impeccable only in retrospect. They might at the time have added up to any number of futures; ancient history is oddly short on incorrect omens. Only later were the unmistakable signs fitted to the occasion, compiled by men who happened to believe Caesar’s murder as much justified as preordained.
The explanations similarly piled up later, history being a kind of omen-in-reverse enterprise. As they did so, Cleopatra began to assume a role in the murder. Her presence in Rome demanded an explanation and it got one. She resolved certain mysteries, corralled the stray motives and rogue details of Caesar’s story. There was for starters the stubborn problem of the Alexandrian stay. Whether a tribute to Cleopatra’s influence or her ambitions, it had to mean something. And what was the significance of her gilded image in the Forum, at Venus’s side? Idle tongues and poison pens were in great supply after March 15, when there was much accounting to do, when it became more and more clear that Caesar’s assassins had no set plan for the future and that Rome had suffered a terrible loss. Significantly, the person most likely to have incriminated Cleopatra does not: She figures nowhere on Cicero’s long list of Caesar’s missteps and offenses. In addressing a mournful Rome, Cicero invoked the destruction wrought by Helen of Troy, but he was speaking of Antony rather than Cleopatra.
Caesar had over the previous months evidenced an immoderate taste for extravagant, unprecedented honors. There had been much provocative playacting with diadems, an accessory from which any good Roman recoiled. Whether this was planned by Caesar or inflicted on him is unclear. It seems the first to offer those honors were also the first to condemn, that with each tribute Caesar’s colleagues prepared for him a sort of ambush, “because they wished to make him envied and hated as quickly as possible, that he might the sooner perish.” Caesar stood supreme; at least in retrospect, it seemed logical that he wanted to be a god in his country as Cleopatra was a goddess in hers. Soon it was bandied about that a law had been in the works “permitting him to have intercourse with as many women as he pleased.” (Suetonius cleaned this up, noting that Caesar was to be allowed to marry many wives “for the purpose of begetting children.”) He was to be allowed not only to have several wives but to wed his foreign mistress, not then possible under the law, which recognized only marriages between Romans. Caesar was said to have intended as well to transfer the capital of the empire to Alexandria. He was intent on “taking with him the resources of the state, draining Italy by levies, and leaving the charge of the city to his friends.” That account made sense not only of Cleopatra, but of the implicit insult that could be read into her lover’s architectural ambitions, his manic refashioning of Rome. The two Caesars—before Egypt and after Spain—were incompatible, and incomprehensibly so; Cleopatra supplied a neat dividing line. She could be said to explain his obsession with power and titles in the last five months of his life, the royal trappings and divine cravings, the wayward crowns and the oddly autocratic demeanor. By our century, she had come to have conspired in the diadem-distributing charades. She planted the absolutist ideal in Caesar’s mind and was poised to become empress of Rome. She exercised a decisive, corrupting influence on the Roman leader, to the extent that a new Caesar was born in Egypt—and to the extent that Cleopatra properly qualified as the founder of the Roman Empire.
Certainly Cleopatra contributed to Caesar’s downfall, although there is no evidence of imperial design on her part or on his, no treachery, or for that matter, any blinding, fatal passion. How much of a role she played is debatable. For all her persuasive talents, she was unlikely to have been much involved in domestic politics in any meaningful way. Were she and Caesar considering a joint monarchy? Possibly, but no evidence remains. Sometimes a business trip is just a business trip. Suetonius recognized the lot of the unadorned historical account, destined to be improved upon by “silly folk, who will try to use the curling-irons on his narrative.” The polymathic Nicolaus of
