Cleopatra got a promotion as well, from pretext to punctuation point. If you were looking for a date for the beginning of the modern world, her death would be the best to fix upon. With her she took both the four-hundred- year-old Roman Republic and the Hellenistic Age. Octavian would go on to effect one of the greatest bait and switches in history; he restored the Republic in all its glory and—as would be apparent within a decade or so—as a monarchy. Having learned from Caesar’s example, he did so subtly. Octavian was never a “king,” always a “princeps,” or “first citizen.” For a title that was at once sufficiently grand and free of all monarchical odor, he turned to Cleopatra’s former friend Plancus, the painted sea nymph. Plancus coined the name “Augustus,” to signify that the man formerly known as Gaius Julius Caesar was more than human, that he was precious and revered.
There was some irony in fact that the West quickly began to resemble Cleopatra’s East, the more so as Octavian had advertised Cleopatra as a threat to the Republic, something she had never intended. Around Octavian formed a kind of court. He fell out with nearly every member of his immediate family. The Roman emperors became gods. They had their pictures painted as Serapis, following Antony’s Dionysian lead. And professions of austerity aside, the mantle of magnificence passed easily. While Octavian was said to have melted down Cleopatra’s fabulous gold tableware, Hellenistic grandeur prevailed. “For it is fitting that we who rule over many people,” reasoned one of Octavian’s advisers, “should surpass all men in all things, and brilliance of this sort, also, tends in a way to inspire our allies with respect for us and our enemies with terror.” He counseled Octavian to spare no expense. Rome represented the new luxury market. The artisans and industries followed. Livia had a personal staff of more than a thousand. So impressed was Octavian by Cleopatra’s lofty mausoleum that he built a similar one in Rome; Alexandria deserves much credit for Rome’s transformation from brick to marble. Octavian died at age seventy-six, at home in his bed, one of the few Roman emperors not murdered by close kin, another Hellenistic legacy. Having ruled for forty-four years—twice as long as Cleopatra—he had plenty of time in which to refashion the events that had brought him to power.* He had too cause to note “that no high position is ever free from envy or treachery, and least of all a monarchy.” The enemies were bad but the friends arguably worse. The office, he concluded, was utterly dreadful.
THE REWRITING OF history began almost immediately. Not only did Mark Antony disappear from the record, but Actium wondrously transformed itself into a major engagement, a resounding victory, a historical turning point. It went from an end to a beginning. Augustus had rescued the country from great peril. He had resolved the civil war and restored world peace after a century of unrest. Time began anew. To read the official historians, it is as if with his return the Italian peninsula burst—after a crippling, ashen century of violence—into Technicolor, as if the crops sat suddenly upright, plump and golden, in the fields. “Validity was restored to the laws, authority to the courts, and dignity to the senate,” proclaims Velleius, very nearly cataloguing the duties with which Caesar had been meant to contend in 46. Augustus’s ego is embedded in the calendar, where it remains to this day, commemorating the fall of Alexandria and Rome’s reprieve from a foreign menace.* Calendars of the time acknowledge the date as one on which he freed Rome “from a most grievous danger.”
Cleopatra was particularly ill served; the turncoats wrote the history, Dellius, Plancus, and Nicolaus of Damascus first among them. The years after Actium were a time of extravagant praise and lavish mythmaking. Her career also coincided with the birth of Latin literature; it was Cleopatra’s curse to inspire its great poets, happy to expound on her shame, in a language inhospitable to her and all she represented. Horace wrote exuberantly of Actium. The first to celebrate Octavian’s splendid victory, he did so while Cleopatra was still frantically fortifying Alexandria. He celebrates her defeat before it has occurred. Virgil and Propertius were on hand for the Egyptian triumph, by which time both the asp and Cleopatra’s pernicious influence were already set in stone. In every reckoning Antony is made to flee Actium on Cleopatra’s account. She helpfully illuminated one of Propertius’s favorite points: a man in love is a helpless man, shamefully subservient to his mistress. It is as if Octavian delivers Rome from that ill as well. He has restored the natural order of things: men ruled women, and Rome ruled the world. On both counts, Cleopatra was crucial to the story. Virgil composed the
Since Cleopatra’s death her fortunes have waxed and waned as dramatically as they did in her lifetime. Her power has been made to derive from her sexuality, for obvious reason; as one of Caesar’s murderers had noted, “How much more attention people pay to their fears than to their memories!” It has always been preferable to attribute a woman’s success to her beauty rather than to her brains, to reduce her to the sum of her sex life. Against a powerful enchantress there is no contest. Against a woman who ensnares a man in the coils of her serpentine intelligence—in her ropes of pearls—there should, at least, be some kind of antidote. Cleopatra unsettles more as sage than as seductress; it is less threatening to believe her fatally attractive than fatally intelligent. (Menander’s fourth-century adage—“A man who teaches a woman to write should recognize that he is providing poison to an asp”—was still being copied out by schoolchildren hundreds of years after her death.) It also makes a better story. Propertius sets the tone. Cleopatra was for him a wanton seductress, “the whore queen,” later “a woman of insatiable sexuality and insatiable avarice” (Dio), a carnal sinner (Dante), “the whore of the eastern kings” (Boccaccio), a poster child for unlawful love (Dryden).* Propertius has her fornicating with her slaves. A first-century Roman would assert (falsely) that “ancient writers repeatedly speak of Cleopatra’s insatiable libido.” In one ancient account she is so insatiable that “she often played the prostitute.” (She is also both so beautiful and toxic that “many men bought nights with her at the price of their lives.”) In the estimation of one nineteenth-century woman, she was “a dazzling piece of witchcraft.” Florence Nightingale referred to her as “that disgusting Cleopatra.” Offering her the movie role, Cecil B. DeMille is said to have asked Claudette Colbert, “How would you like to be the wickedest woman in history?” Cleopatra stars even in a 1928 book called
The personal inevitably trumps the political, and the erotic trumps all: We will remember that Cleopatra slept with Julius Caesar and Mark Antony long after we have forgotten what she accomplished in doing so, that she sustained a vast, rich, densely populated empire in its troubled twilight, in the name of a proud and cultivated dynasty. She remains on the map for having seduced two of the greatest men of her time, while her crime was to have entered into those same “wily and suspicious” marital partnerships that every man in power enjoyed. She did so in reverse and in her own name; this made her a deviant, socially disruptive, an unnatural woman. To these she added a few other offenses. She made Rome feel uncouth, insecure, and poor, sufficient cause for anxiety without adding sexuality to the mix. For some time she haunted the ancient imagination, primarily as a cautionary tale. Under Augustus the institution of marriage took on a new luster, a development that boded poorly for Cleopatra, the destabilizing, domineering home wrecker.
She elicited scorn and envy in equal and equally distorting measure; her story is constructed as much of male fear as fantasy. From Plutarch descends history’s greatest love story, though Cleopatra’s life was neither as lurid nor as romantic as has been made out. And she became a femme fatale twice over. For Actium to be the battle to beat all battles, she had to be the “wild queen” plotting Rome’s destruction. For Antony to have succumbed to something other than a fellow Roman, Cleopatra had to be a disarming seductress “who had already ruined him and would make his ruin still more complete.” It can be difficult to say where vengeance ends and homage begins. Her power was immediately enhanced because—for one man’s historical purposes—she needed to have reduced another to abject slavery. It is true that she was a dutiful, father-loving daughter, a patriot and protector, an early nationalist, a symbol of courage, a wise ruler with nerves of steel, a master at self-presentation. It is not true that she built the lighthouse of Alexandria, could manufacture gold, was the ideal woman (Gautier), a martyr to love (Chaucer), “a silly little girl” (Shaw), the mother of Christ. A seventh-century Coptic bishop termed her “the most illustrious and wise of women,” greater than the kings who preceded her. On a good day Cleopatra is said to have died for love, which is not exactly true either. Ultimately everyone from Michelangelo to Gerome, from Corneille to Brecht, got a crack at her. The Renaissance was obsessed with her, the Romantics yet more so. She sent even Shakespeare over the top, eliciting from him his greatest female role, his richest poetry, a full, Antony-less last act, and, in the estimation of one critic, a rollicking tribute to guilt-free middle-aged adultery. Shakespeare may be as much to blame for our having lost sight of Cleopatra VII as the Alexandrian humidity, Roman propaganda, and
