Cleopatra: A Life (10 page)

Fortunately for Caesar and Cleopatra, a large army of reinforcements hurried toward Alexandria. The best help came from a high-ranking Judaean official, who arrived with a contingent of three thousand well-armed Jews. Ptolemy set out to crush that force at nearly the same moment that Caesar set out to join it; he was for some time frustrated by the Egyptian cavalry. All converged in a fierce battle west of the Nile, at a location halfway between Alexandria and present-day Cairo. The casualties were great on both sides, but—by storming the high point of the Egyptian camp in a surprise early-morning maneuver—Caesar managed a swift victory. Terrified, a great number of the Egyptians hurled themselves from the ramparts of their fort into the surrounding trenches. Some survived. It seemed Ptolemy did not; he was probably little mourned by anyone, including his advisers. As his body never materialized, Caesar took special pains to display his golden armor, which did. The magical, rejuvenating powers of the Nile were well known; already it had delivered up queens in sacks and babies in baskets. Caesar did not want a resurrection on his hands, though even his meticulous efforts now would not prevent the appearance of a Ptolemy-pretender later.

With his cavalry Caesar hurried to Alexandria, to receive the kind of welcome he had doubtless expected months earlier:
“The entire population
of the town threw down their weapons, left their defenses, assumed the
garb in which suppliants commonly crave pardon from their masters, and after bringing out all the sacred objects with whose religious awe they used to appeal to their displeased or angry monarchs, went to meet Caesar as he approached, and surrendered to him.” Graciously he accepted the surrender and consoled the populace. Cleopatra would have been ecstatic; Caesar’s defeat would have been hers as well. She presumably received advance word but would in any event have heard the raucous cheers as Caesar approached on horseback. His legions met him at the palace with loud applause. It was March 27; the relief must have been extreme. Caesar’s men had given him more than a decade of service, and on arrival in Alexandria believed the civil war to be over. They had by no means counted on this last, little understood exploit. Nor were they alone in their consternation. Rome had heard nothing from Caesar since December. What was keeping him in Egypt, when all was off-kilter at home? Whatever the reason for the delay, the silence was unsettling. It must have begun to seem that Egypt had claimed Caesar as it had Pompey and—as some would argue—in an entirely different way, it ultimately would.

Why did he stay? There is no convincing political explanation for the interlude, an illogical adventure in the life of a supremely logical man. It remains baffling that the greatest soldier since Alexander,
“a prodigy of activity
and foresight” on every other occasion, should have been blindsided and sandbagged in Africa. The best that can be said of the Alexandrian War is that
Caesar acquitted himself
brilliantly in a situation in which he stupidly found himself. For an explanation he cited the northerly winds,
“which blew absolutely
directly against anyone sailing out of Alexandria.” Indeed they would have, though a sentence earlier Caesar acknowledges having sent to Asia for reinforcements, the reinforcements that would ultimately save the day. That mission would have involved an outbound trip. And within weeks the winds were strongly in his favor. Caesar did not back down; even with a depleted, demoralized army, he was not one to turn from danger. He makes no reference himself to Auletes’ great debt, a cause for landing if not for remaining. As so often happens, the question comes down to love or money. It is not easy to argue against the former.

In the first place we have Caesar’s resounding silence. We leave all kinds of things out of our memoirs and Caesar (and his ghostwriter) omitted a great many, not least of all his personality. Caesar wrote of himself with a stern, clinical detachment and in the third person; his style is so limpid and dispassionate as to appear incontestably true. Which it may well be, though in his account he neither crosses the Rubicon nor sets fire to the Alexandrian library. It is entirely possible that the latter charge was overstated. The dockyard warehouses may alone have gone up in flames, which would have destroyed only grain supplies and a modest number of texts.
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Similarly, one of the few places Cleopatra fails to make a dramatic entrance is in Caesar’s
Civil War,
where her charms are supplanted by the seasonal winds. For a married man who had been pilloried once for his stay in an Eastern court, for a military genius who made a gross blunder at the side of a queen if not on her behalf, this was not a matter that invited elaboration. In the continuation of Caesar’s narrative, Cleopatra appears precisely once. At war’s end he bestows the throne of Egypt upon her, because she
“had remained loyal
to him, and stayed within his lines.” Cleopatra goes down in Caesar’s history for one reason alone: she was good and obedient.

Certainly the suspicion that there was more to the matter than unfavorable winds and obedient females was in the air. In Rome Cicero lost no time in casting shameful aspersions. Just after Caesar’s death, Mark Antony—a curious messenger for this particular message—would protest that Caesar had not tarried in Alexandria
“out of voluptuousness.”
A century later, Plutarch begged to differ:
“As to the war in Egypt
, some say it was at once dangerous and dishonorable, and noways necessary, but occasioned only by his passion for Cleopatra.” (The inconvenient oracle of Auletes’ day—prohibiting the restoration of an Egyptian
monarch by a Roman army—appears to have been quickly forgotten.) You could argue that Caesar had no particular affection for Cleopatra, that the two only happened to find themselves on the same side of a baffling war, but it would be easier to argue that she had no affection for him. She contributed nothing to that enterprise. Caesar would have been well served by throwing her over, if only to obtain a temporary truce. He would have been within his rights at war’s end to annex Egypt; Cleopatra must have been very, very persuasive. Pothinus had balked at repaying the Egyptian debt. Clearly Cleopatra did not. It is difficult to escape the conclusion that Caesar was to some extent in her sway. Dio thought that obvious: Caesar handed Egypt to Cleopatra,
“for whose sake
he had waged the conflict.” He acknowledges a certain embarrassment. At war’s end Caesar put Cleopatra on the throne with her remaining brother to defuse Roman anger that he was himself sleeping with her. To Dio this was “a mere pretence, which she accepted, whereas in truth she ruled alone and spent her time in Caesar’s company.” The two were inseparable. Plutarch felt similarly but expressed himself more subtly. Reading between his lines, he plainly believed Caesar both preoccupied with military matters and
in Cleopatra’s bed every night
. There is as well the minor matter of the departure date. The Alexandrian War ended on March 27. Caesar stayed with Cleopatra until mid-June.

THERE WAS REASON
to celebrate, all the more so after having been cooped up behind a thicket of barricades for the better part of six months. And as
every visitor to Hellenistic Egypt
had noted, eyes wide, belly bursting, travel bag groaning, the Ptolemies knew how to entertain. Save that written by a poet who demonized Caesar and had less affection for Cleopatra, we have no account of her actual postwar banquets. We do know what a Ptolemaic feast looked like. Self-restraint was not an Alexandrian specialty, and in the spring of 47 Cleopatra had no cause to embrace it. She had secured the greatest of prizes, for
“in view of Caesar’s favor
there was nothing that she could not do.” He had gone further out on a limb than had any other Roman for an Egyptian
sovereign. Ptolemy XIII, Pothinus, and Achillas were all dead. Theodotus was in exile, Arsinoe in Roman custody. Caesar had effectively eliminated every one of Cleopatra’s rivals to the throne. She reigned supreme, more securely than she had done four years previously, more securely than had any Ptolemy in several generations. She prided herself on her hospitality and knew her guest did as well; Caesar had once thrown his baker into chains for having served substandard bread. He was himself responsible for a fair amount of entertainment inflation. The queen of Egypt had every political reason to impress and please him; personal rapport aside, there would have been a heady admixture of pride, relief, and gratitude. And she had the resources to impress. The Alexandrian War gave Cleopatra everything she wanted. It cost her little.

Even in her exile, a swarm of servants had hovered around Cleopatra, ministering to her comforts. In the spring of 47 that swarm increased to a horde, with the return or appointment of tasters, scribes, lamplighters, royal harpists, masseurs, pages, doorkeepers, notaries, silver stewards, oil keepers, pearl setters. At her side also was a new consort. To satisfy the people’s preference for a ruling couple, possibly as well to cover Caesar’s tracks, twelve-year-old Ptolemy XIV ascended to the throne. The marriage took place soon after the Alexandrian surrender. We do not know how it was celebrated. From Cleopatra’s perspective, one nonentity replaced another. Ptolemy XIV assumed the same title that had been used by his dead brother; he never appeared with his sister on her coins. If he had ambitions or opinions of his own he knew better than to express them now. Surely he had no say in the administration that his sister-wife set about reconstituting. Whether or not Caesar had considered annexing Egypt he had clearly discovered that Cleopatra was in many respects similar to her country: a shame to lose, a risk to conquer, a headache to govern. Some courtiers had remained faithful; among Cleopatra’s entourage figured several of her father’s advisers. Those who had not did their best quickly to reassess their conduct. So presumably did the Greek aristocracy, which had presented Cleopatra with her strongest opposition.

She had at court a serious handicap, one that Caesar would have done
well to observe. As a later Roman leader noted:
“For the ruler labors
under this special disadvantage as regards his friends, that although he can protect himself from his enemies by arranging his friends against them, there is no corresponding ally on whom he may rely to protect him from these friends.” For the most part Cleopatra knew who the ill-wishers were. Matters were murkier concerning her courtiers. She had after all been holed up for months with a Roman, battling a people who wanted no Roman in the house and who had deposed her father for consorting with them. The rules had now changed. There was always a certain amount of rot at court; the war would have been an excuse to clean it out. Those who had opposed Cleopatra paid a heavy price. Those rumored to have done so doubtless paid too. She replaced high officials and eliminated others, confiscating fortunes in the process. There were poisonings and stabbings, not dissimilar from those in which Auletes had engaged upon his restoration. The army alone invited a bloody round of proscriptions. It was by no means a smooth transition.

Around the palace and harbor there was more prosaic work to be done: trenches to be filled, palisades to be dismantled, debris to be cleared, structural damage to be repaired. What emerged was and remained
“the first city of the civilized
world, certainly far ahead of all the rest in elegance and extent and riches and luxury,” as a contemporary traveler put it. Visitors were at a loss to decide if Alexandria’s size or beauty was the more imposing. That was before acknowledging its hyperkinetic population.
“Looking at the city
, I doubted whether any race of men could ever fill it; looking at the inhabitants, I wondered whether any city could ever be found large enough to hold them all. The balance seemed exactly even,” effused a native son. Alexandria was studded with an awe-inspiring collection of sculpture, much of it carved of pink or red granite and violet porphyry, all of it pulsing with robust color. To anyone who knew Athens, the Egyptian city felt familiar, crowded as it was with fine Ptolemaic copies of Greek pieces. It was neither the first nor the last place in the world where a decline in power translated into an enormity of symbols; as the Ptolemaic influence diminished, the statuary
ballooned, to hyperbolic dimensions. Forty-foot-tall rose granite sculptures of Cleopatra II and Cleopatra III greeted new arrivals in the Alexandrian harbor. At least one colossal hawk-headed sphinx towered over the palace wall. Glossy thirty-foot-long sphinxes guarded the city’s temples.

Alexandria’s ninety-foot-wide main avenue left visitors speechless, its scale unmatched in the ancient world. You could lose a day exploring it from end to end. Lined with delicately carved columns, silk awnings, and richly painted facades, the Canopic Way could accommodate eight chariots driving abreast. The city’s primary side streets too were nearly twenty feet wide, paved with stones, expertly drained, and partially lit at night. From its central crossroads—a ten-minute walk from the palace—a forest of sparkling limestone colonnades extended as far as the eye could see. On the city’s western side lived most of its Egyptian population, many of them linen weavers, clustered around the hundred steps that led up to the Serapeum, the third-century temple that dominated the city and housed its secondary library. That rectangular temple—much of it decorated in gold leaf, silver, and bronze—stood on a rocky, artificial hill, surrounded by parks and porticoes. It is one of only three monuments of Cleopatra’s day that we can locate with accuracy today. The city’s Jewish quarter stood in the northeast, next to the palace. Greeks occupied the fine three-story houses at the center of town. Industry divided neighborhoods as well: one quarter was devoted to the manufacture of perfumes and to the fabrication of their alabaster pots, another to glassworkers.

From east to west the city measured nearly four miles, a wonderland of baths, theaters, gymnasiums, courts, temples, shrines, and synagogues. A limestone wall surrounded its perimeter, punctuated by towers, patrolled at both ends of the Canopic Way by prostitutes. During the day Alexandria echoed with the sounds of horses’ hooves, the cries of porridge sellers or chickpea vendors, street performers, soothsayers, moneylenders. Its spice stands released exotic aromas, carried through the streets by a thick, salty sea breeze. Long-legged white and black ibises
assembled at every intersection, foraging for crumbs. Until well into the evening, when the vermilion sun plunged precipitously into the harbor, Alexandria remained a swirl of reds and yellows, a swelling kaleidoscope of music, chaos, and color. Altogether it was a mood-altering city of extreme sensuality and high intellectualism, the Paris of the ancient world: superior in its ways, splendid in its luxuries, the place to go to spend your fortune, write your poetry, find (or forget) a romance, restore your health, reinvent yourself, or regroup after having conquered vast swaths of Italy, Spain, and Greece over the course of a Herculean decade.