discourage murmurs that she was selling out to the Romans; with it Cleopatra signaled to her subjects that she was first and foremost their pharaoh.* Certainly the imagery on her coins is reassuringly consistent with that of previous Ptolemies. By any name she was as powerful a figure as existed on the non-Roman stage. When Antony had vanquished the Parthians, she would be empress of the East. Various coastal cities acknowledged as much, issuing coins in Antony and Cleopatra’s honor. She had every reason to be ecstatic. There was not a smudge on the horizon.
Cleopatra could only have looked forward to celebrating the new dawn in Alexandria. Having sacrificed all after the Ides of March, she had not only regained a foothold but fared better this time around. Their pride in the newly established empire aside, how did her subjects take to her close collaboration with a second Roman? There is no trace of scandal. Her people remained focused on the practical implications of Cleopatra’s diplomacy. “It seems to me,” an eminent scholar has suggested, “that the loves and births of a female pharaoh struck them as divine matters, and that they questioned their queen only when her tax collectors pressed too stringently.” She had cleverly solved a political puzzle. The lack of resistance at home may indicate as well that she was not unduly generous with Mark Antony. She may have agreed to pay for his legions, but that Cleopatra could afford without oppressive levies on her people. Nor was there reason to believe Antony’s territorial dispositions set off alarms in Rome. They were part of a consistent foreign policy. They enriched the coffers and secured the frontiers. In Egypt, Cleopatra’s popularity could only have been at an all-time high.
In light of the gift, many have concluded that Mark Antony and Cleopatra married in Antioch that fall, an awkward proposition as Antony already had a wife. And given his munificence, many have assumed that Cleopatra specified what she would like on the occasion, to which request Antony acceded. There is no evidence of either in Plutarch, the sole source for the reunion, and not a chronicler inclined to omit such a transaction. He allows only that Antony acknowledged their mutual children, by no means tantamount to marriage. Certainly Antony had as much if not more to be gained as did Cleopatra: Even Plutarch could not call it a mistake for the Roman triumvir to ally himself with the richest woman in his world. His immediate, practical needs dovetailed neatly with her long- range imperial ambitions. There is less evidence of a wedding than of Cleopatra’s thirst for territory, which manifested itself for the first time now. Either in 37 or the following year, she is said to have pestered Antony for the bulk of Judaea. He apparently refused. (His tenacity on that front has been held up as evidence that he was not putty in her strong hands. He withheld the grant, hence he was not out of his mind with love. Just as possibly, Cleopatra knew her limits and never asked for Judaea, which leaves open the question of Antony’s emotional state.) It is unlikely that she had to haggle for territory, though she was well positioned to do so. Antony needed to finance a campaign, pay an army, supplement a navy. Cleopatra needed nothing. Hers was the better negotiating position.
Whatever transpired between the two, the perception among the other client kings in the region was that Antony was deeply, resolutely attached to Cleopatra. It is more difficult to read what was in her heart, at least in 37. We have a few hints, however. Before or after Egypt expanded to its third-century proportions, before or after she reset the calendar, Antony and Cleopatra resumed their sexual relationship, picking up where they had left off in Tarsus. And evidently Antony’s presence meant as much to Cleopatra as did his patronage. In March or April 36, she accompanied him along the broad, flat road from Antioch to the edge of the Roman empire, an overland trip that took her hundreds of miles out of her way. It was unnecessary for her and less comfortable than it might otherwise have been, as she was again pregnant. Antony and Cleopatra said their good-byes on the banks of the Euphrates, where the river narrowed into a deep channel, in what is today eastern Turkey. He crossed the wooden bridge into Parthian territory, to march north with his resplendent army, through the vast obstacle course of steppes and rugged mountains that stretch beyond the Euphrates. Cleopatra headed south.
SHE TOOK THE long way home, making a kind of triumphal, overland tour of her new possessions. Many were happy to receive her; some of the despots Antony eliminated on her behalf had been nefarious. Around Damascus, for example, Cleopatra now ruled a territory previously controlled by a tribe of predatory, archery- obsessed bandits. With her entourage she wound her way over the rolling hills and rugged cliffs of modern-day Syria and Lebanon, through twisting passes and deep ravines, to wind up on the crest of a mountain chain, between two lofty hills, in Jerusalem. Surrounded by turreted walls and a series of square, thirty-foot towers, Jerusalem was an eminent commercial center, rich in the arts. Cleopatra had business with Herod, who—though an untiring negotiator—could not have been in any great hurry to discuss it.
When last they had met, Herod had been a fugitive and a suppliant. He now sat uneasily on the Judaean throne, king of a people he had had to conquer in order to rule.* Presumably Cleopatra and her retinue stayed with the newly established sovereign, a collector of homes and a man with a Ptolemaic taste for luxury, though his legendarily opulent palace south of the city had yet to be built. Probably Cleopatra was Herod’s guest at his home in the Upper City of Jerusalem, by her definition more of a fortress than a palace. In the course of the visit she met Herod’s fractious extended family, with whom she was about to enter into a subversive correspondence. Herod had the misfortune to share an address with several implacable enemies, first among them his contemptuous, highborn mother-in-law, Alexandra. She represented but one aggravation in Herod’s largely female household. He lived as well with his insinuating mother; a grievance-loving, overly loyal sister; and Mariamme, the cool, exceptionally beautiful wife who had married him as a teenager, and who, to his frustration, somehow could never get past the fact that Herod had murdered half of her family. Though Cleopatra had assisted him three years earlier, though they shared a patron and were together navigating the same roiling Roman waters—each was doing his best to sustain a skittish, peculiar country in the shadow of a rising superpower—he had no need for yet another domineering woman. Unlike the others, this one moreover had designs on his treasury.
For Cleopatra’s visit we have only one source, hostile to his native East, much taken with Rome, working at least partially from Herod’s account. The Jewish historian Josephus obscures but cannot entirely camouflage what transpired: Herod and Cleopatra spent some intensive time in each other’s company, part of it hammering out the details of his obligations. Antony had granted Cleopatra the exclusive right to the Dead Sea bitumen, or asphalt, glutinous lumps of which floated to the surface of the lake. Bitumen was essential to mortar, incense, and insecticide, to embalming and caulking. A reed basket, smeared with asphalt, could hold water. Plastered with it, a boat is waterproof. The concession was a lucrative one. Also Cleopatra’s were the proceeds of Jericho, the popular winter resort, lush with date-palm groves and balsam gardens. Very likely she rode out across a searing desert to inspect those two hundred acres in the Jordan River valley, where Herod had a secondary palace. All other scents paled in comparison to sweet balsam, which grew exclusively in Judaea. The fragrant shrub’s oil, seed, and bark were precious. They constituted the region’s most valuable export. As for Jericho’s dates, they were the finest in the ancient world, the source of its most potent wine. In modern terms, it was as if Cleopatra had been granted no part of Kuwait, only the proceeds of its oil fields.
Herod found the transaction particularly painful as Judaea was a poor country, parched and stony, with few fertile areas, no port, and a rapidly expanding population. His revenues were a risible fraction of Cleopatra’s. At the same time his ambitions exceeded his territory; he had no desire to be “King of a wilderness.” There appears to have been some bickering over terms, in a negotiation that proved Cleopatra more intently focused on bitumen deliveries than seductions. She was relentless and unsparing; the result was highly favorable to her. Herod agreed to lease the Jericho lands for 200 talents annually. He consented as well to guarantee and collect the rent on the bitumen monopoly from his neighbor, the Nabatean king. By agreeing to do so Herod spared himself the company of any of Cleopatra’s agents or soldiers. Otherwise the arrangement worked entirely to her benefit, all the more so as it made both men miserable. It left Herod to extract funds from a sovereign who had denied him refuge during the Parthian invasion, and who made his payments only under duress. Purposely and effectively, Cleopatra set two men who disliked her, a Jew and an Arab, against each other. (Malchus, the Nabatean sovereign, would have his revenge later.) Herod nonetheless upheld his end of the agreement with Cleopatra. He felt that “it would be unsafe to give her any reason to hate him.”
The visit was by all other measures an unsuccessful one. The two inveterate charmers failed entirely to endear themselves to each other. Cleopatra may have patronized her fellow sovereign. As his royal mother-in-law tirelessly reminded him, Herod was a commoner. Nor was he exactly Jewish, given his mother’s religion; in the eyes of the Jews Herod was a gentile, while in all other eyes he was a Jew. He was as a consequence perennially insecure about his throne, a situation not unfamiliar to Cleopatra, who may have exacerbated it. Her Aramaic may have been better than his Greek; several years her senior, Herod was little educated, sorely deficient in history and
