wrote from right to left. It was no wonder that Herodotus should have asserted, in an account Cleopatra would have known well, that Egyptian women ventured into the markets while the men sat at home tending their looms. We have ample testimony to her sense of humor; Cleopatra was a wit and a prankster. There is no cause to question how she read Herodotus’s further assertion that Egypt was a country in which “the women urinate standing up, the men sitting down.”
On another count Herodotus was entirely correct. “There is no country that possesses so many wonders, nor any that has such a number of works that defy description,” he marveled. Well before the Ptolemies, Egypt exercised its spell on the world. It boasted an ancient civilization, any number of natural oddities, monuments of baffling immensity, two of the seven wonders of the ancient world. (The capacity for wonder may have been greater in Cleopatra’s day but the pyramids were taller too, by thirty-one feet.) And in the intermissions between bloodlettings, largely in the third century and before the dynasty began to wobble under its own depravity late in the second, the Ptolemies had made good on Alexander the Great’s plans, establishing on the Nile delta a miracle of a city, one that was as sleekly sophisticated as its founding people had been unpolished. From a distance Alexandria blinded, a sumptuous suffusion of gleaming marble, over which presided its towering lighthouse. Its celebrated skyline was reproduced on lamps, mosaics, tiles. The city’s architecture announced its magpie ethos, forged of a frantic accretion of cultures. In this greatest of Mediterranean ports, papyrus fronds topped Ionic columns. Oversize sphinxes and falcons lined the paths to Greek temples. Crocodile gods in Roman dress decorated Doric tombs. “Built in the finest situation in the world,” Alexandria stood sentry over a land of fabled riches and fantastic creatures, a favorite enigma to the Roman world. To a man like Julius Caesar, who for all his travels had never before set foot in Egypt, few of its astonishments would have been as great as the quick-witted young woman who had emerged from the traveler’s sack.
SHE WAS BORN in 69 BC, the second of three daughters. Two brothers followed, to each of which Cleopatra would, in succession, be briefly joined in marriage. While there was never a particularly safe time to be born a Ptolemy, the first century may have been among the worst. All five siblings met violent ends. Among them Cleopatra distinguishes herself for having alone dictated the circumstances of her demise, no small accomplishment and, in Roman terms, a distinction of some weight. The very fact that she was still alive at the time of Caesar’s arrival was testimony to her character. She had clearly been conspiring for a year or more, energetically for months, nearly around the clock over the late summer weeks. Equally significant was the fact that she would outlive her siblings by decades. Neither brother survived adolescence.
Of Cleopatra’s mother we have neither glimpse nor echo; she disappears from the scene early in Cleopatra’s childhood and was dead by the time Cleopatra was twelve. It is unclear if her daughter knew her any better than do we. She seems to have been one of the rare Ptolemaic women to have opted out of the family melodrama.* Cleopatra V Tryphaena was in any event several decades younger than Auletes, her brother or half brother; the two had married shortly after Auletes ascended to the throne. The fact that his aunt contested his right to the kingship—she went so far as to travel to Rome to press the case against him—is not particularly meaningful, given the family dynamic. It may, however, speak to her political instincts. To many minds Auletes appeared more interested in the arts than in statecraft. Despite a rule that lasted twenty-two years, with one interruption, he would be remembered as the pharaoh who piped while Egypt collapsed.
Of Caesar’s early years virtually nothing is recorded and Cleopatra goes him one better: we have no clues at all. Were her childhood home not today twenty feet underwater or were the climate of Alexandria more forgiving toward ancient papyri, it is unlikely that we would be further enlightened. Childhood was not a big seller in the ancient world, where fate and pedigree were the formative influences. The ancient players tended to emerge fully formed. We can safely assume that Cleopatra was born in the palace of Alexandria; that a wet nurse cared for her; that a household retainer chewed her first foods before placing them in her gummy mouth; that nothing passed her childhood lips that had not first been tasted for poison; that she counted among her playmates a gaggle of noble- born children, known as “foster siblings” and destined to become the royal entourage. Even as she scampered down the colonnaded walkways of the palace, past its fountains and fishponds, or through its lush groves and zoological garden—earlier Ptolemies had kept giraffes, rhinoceroses, bears, a forty-five-foot python—she was surrounded by a retinue. From an early age she was comfortable among politicians, ambassadors, scholars, at ease amid a flock of purple-cloaked court officials. She played with terra-cotta dolls and dollhouses and tea sets and miniature furniture, with dice and rocking horses and knucklebones and pet mice, though we will never know what she did with her dolls and whether, like Indira Gandhi, she engaged them in insurrections and battles.
Along with her older sister, Cleopatra was groomed for the throne; a Ptolemy planned for all eventualities. She made regular trips up the Nile, to the family’s harborfront palace in Memphis, to participate in traditional Egyptian cult festivals, carefully stage-managed, opulent processions of family, advisers, and staff. Two hundred miles upriver, Memphis was a sacred city, managed by a hierarchy of priests; death has been said to have been its greatest business. Vast animal catacombs stretched under its center, a magnet for the pilgrims who came to worship and to stock up on miniature mummified hawks and crocodiles at its souvenir stands. At home, these were objects of veneration. On such occasions Cleopatra would have been outfitted in ceremonial dress, though not yet in the traditional Egyptian crown of plumes, sun disk, and cow’s horns. And from an early age she enjoyed the best education available in the Hellenistic world, at the hands of the most gifted scholars, in what was incontestably the greatest center of learning in existence: The library of Alexandria and its attached museum were literally in her backyard. The most prestigious of its scholars were her tutors, its men of science her doctors. She did not have to venture far for a prescription, a eulogy, a mechanical toy, a map.
That education may well have exceeded her father’s—raised abroad, in northeastern Asia Minor—but would have been a traditional Greek education in every respect, nearly identical to that of Caesar, whose tutor had studied in Alexandria. It was preeminently literary. Letters mattered in the Greek world, where they served additionally as numbers and musical notes. Cleopatra learned to read first by chanting the Greek alphabet, then by tracing letters incised by her teacher on a narrow wooden tablet. The successful student went on to practice them in continuous horizontal rows, later in columns, eventually in reverse order, ultimately in pairs from either end of the alphabet, in capitals and again in cursive. When Cleopatra graduated to syllables it was to a body of abstruse, unpronounceable words, the more outlandish the better. The lines of doggerel that followed were equally esoteric; the theory appears to have been that the student who could decode these could decode anything. Maxims and verse came next, based on fables and myths. A student might be called upon to render a tale of Aesop’s in his own words, in simplest form, a second time with grandiloquence. More complex impersonations came later. She might write as Achilles, on the verge of being killed, or be called upon to restate a plot of Euripides. The lessons were neither easy nor meant to be. Learning was a serious business, involving endless drills, infinite rules, long hours. There was no such thing as a weekend; one studied on all save for festival days, which came with merciful regularity in Alexandria. Twice a month all ground to a halt on Apollo’s account. Discipline was severe. “The ears of a youth are on his back; he listens when he is beaten,” reads an early papyrus. Into that adage the playwright Menander injected cause and effect: “He who is not thrashed cannot be educated.” Generations of schoolchildren dutifully inscribed that line on the red wax centers of wooden slates with their ivory styluses.
Even before she graduated to sentences, even before she learned to read, the love affair with Homer began. “Homer was not a man, but a god,” figured among the early penmanship lessons, as did the first cantos of the
On a primary level the indoctrination began with vocabulary lists, of gods, heroes, rivers. More sophisticated assignments followed. What song did the sirens sing? Was Penelope chaste? Who was Hector’s mother? The tangled genealogies of the gods would have posed little difficulty to a Ptolemaic princess, next to whose history
