Cleopatra: A Life (43 page)

On the Mauretanian throne Cleopatra Selene continued her mother’s legacy; her coins bear her likeness and are inscribed in Greek. (Juba’s are in Latin.) Together the couple transformed their capital into a cultural and artistic center, complete with a splendid library. Plenty of Egyptian sculpture—including a piece from July 31, 30, the day before Octavian entered Alexandria—has turned up in the area, where Cleopatra Selene
evidently assembled a gallery of Ptolemaic busts. She continued the
Isis association
, and named her son Ptolemy. She kept sacred
crocodiles
. Cleopatra’s only known grandson, Ptolemy of Mauretania, succeeded Juba in AD 23. Seventeen years into his reign he visited Rome at the invitation of Caligula. Both men descended from Mark Antony; they were half cousins. The Roman emperor greeted the African king with honors, until Ptolemy one day swept into a gladiatorial show in a particularly splendid purple cloak. Heads turned, to
Caligula’s displeasure
. He ordered
Ptolemy’s murder
, an appropriate end to dynasty steeped, from the start, in blazing, supersaturated color.
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Octavian obliterated all traces of Antony in both Rome and Alexandria. January 14, his birthday, was deemed an unlucky day, on which no public business could be transacted. By Senate decree, the names “Mark” and “Antony” were never again to be conjoined. Otherwise he was discarded, a historical inconvenience. Octavian would mention neither Antony nor Cleopatra by name in his account of Actium. He sentenced several of
Antony’s close associates to death
, Canidius and the Roman senator who supervised Cleopatra’s textile mills chief among them. Those who had sworn to perish with Antony and Cleopatra were presumably relieved of the need to see to the job themselves. Other partisans disappeared. The influential high priest at Memphis—who was born the same year as Caesarion, and who had remained personally bound to Cleopatra—died mysteriously several days before her. It was imperative that no one survive who might exercise authority, rally the people, reassemble Cleopatra’s kingdom. Octavian’s men collected the pile of Ptolemaic treasure from the palace and exacted fines throughout the city, inventing misdemeanors as they went. Where imagination failed, they simply confiscated two thirds of a victims’ property. It was a polite kind of plunder; the Romans made out handsomely. Octavian removed from Alexandria the fine statuary and precious art that
Antony and Cleopatra had pillaged throughout Asia, restoring it, for the most part, to the cities to which it belonged. A few of the finest pieces wound up in Rome, where the best art had long come from the second-century sack of Corinth. Seventeen years after Cleopatra’s death, Octavian finished the Caesareum, that pharaonic and Greek marvel, in his honor.

Cleopatra had plenty of partisans, as faithful as had been her ladies-in-waiting, whose
devotion was the talk of Alexandria
. A servant did not normally die for her mistress. Those who had offered to rise up for their queen remained loyal. Cleopatra had her country’s favor; there had been no revolts under her reign. Alexandria must have given itself over to mourning. There were processions and hymns and offerings, the city would have been loud with keening and wails as the women of Alexandria shredded their garments and beat their breasts. On behalf of the native priests, a cleric offered Octavian 2,000 talents to preserve Cleopatra’s many statues. She might remain noble, but she was also dead; the offer was too attractive to refuse. It saved Octavian as well from the thorny business of tangling with Isis, who continued to be worshipped for some time. Cleopatra was often indistinguishable from that goddess; Octavian could not very well go around volatile Alexandria toppling religious statuary. Cleopatra’s statues, and her cult, lived on actively for hundreds of years, no doubt reinforced by her steely last stand against the Romans.

Octavian did not tarry in Egypt, henceforth a Roman province, to which no prominent Roman traveled without express permission. One of the few imperialists in history who did not care to be Alexander the Great—all would have worked out very differently for Cleopatra if he had—he was more invested in raw power than its glorious accessories. He evidenced little interest in Egyptian history, to the dismay of Cleopatra’s former subjects, eager to display the remains of her ancestors. Octavian made it known that he had little patience for dead Ptolemies. He paid his respects only to Alexander the Great, removed from his sarcophagus for the visit. The story goes that Octavian accidentally brushed against the body—he may have been strewing flowers—detaching a piece of mummified nose in the process.

Susceptible as Octavian was to sunstroke—he went nowhere without his broad-brimmed hat—he could not have much enjoyed the liquid heat of an Alexandrian August. In the fall he withdrew to Asia. No one profited more from Cleopatra’s death than Herod, who hosted the Romans again on their northbound trip. Octavian returned to him his precious palm and balsam groves and the coastal cities that Antony had appropriated for Cleopatra, supplementing them with additional territories. Herod’s kingdom swelled finally to dimensions commensurate with his kindnesses. Rome’s new favorite among non-Romans, he inherited as well the four hundred strapping Gauls who had served as Cleopatra’s bodyguard. Nicolaus of Damascus stepped in as his tutor, to become his close confidant. He produced a court history for Herod, from which Josephus—a major source for the life of Cleopatra, and himself a midcareer convert to the Roman cause—would work. Octavian left Gallus in charge of Egypt, as prefect. He too would discover that the province was difficult to rule—in 29 he subdued the people around Thebes,
“the common terror
of all kings”—and that its riches went to one’s head. He exceeded his command, commissioned too many statues of himself, inscribed his great deeds on the pyramids, and, indicted by the Senate, wound up a suicide.

Almost precisely a year after Cleopatra’s death, she paraded in effigy down the streets of Rome, in the last and most sumptuous of Octavian’s three days of triumph. With her a veritable river of gold, silver, and ivory flowed down the Via Sacra and through the Forum. Dio tells us that the Egyptian procession surpassed all others
“in costliness and magnificence.”
After the coffers of gold and silver; the wagons of jewelry, weapons, and art; the colorful placards and pennants; the defeated soldiers, marched the prized prisoners, the ten-year-old twins and six-year-old Ptolemy Philadelphus, in chains. Cleopatra was featured on her deathbed, in plaster or paint, along with the asp who may have started it all. Surrounded by his officers, the purple-cloaked Octavian followed behind. Cleopatra had been wrong in one assessment: Antony was conspicuously missing from the occasion. She was right in another: The only sovereign who did walk in that triumph, an ally of Antony’s, was executed soon
afterward. The city glimmered with the spoils of Egypt; tons of Ptolemaic gold and silver, breastplates and tableware, crowns and shields, gem-studded furniture, paintings and statuary, had sailed with Octavian, as had several crocodiles. Some have placed
a lumbering hippopotamus
and a rhinoceros at the triumph as well. Octavian could well afford to be generous, and there were substantial gifts all around. The Egyptian victory was celebrated with particular élan, not only because it could afford to be. There was a civil war to camouflage.

Cleopatra’s statue remained in the Forum. It was the least Octavian could do for the woman whose golden couches and jeweled pitchers financed his career. Cleopatra allowed him to discharge every one of his obligations. She guaranteed Roman prosperity. So vast were the funds Octavian injected into the economy that prices soared. Interest rates tripled. As Dio summed up the transfer of wealth, Cleopatra saw to it that
“the Roman empire was enriched
and its temples adorned.” Her art and obelisks decorated its streets. Soundly defeated, she was nonetheless celebrated, in the beauty of a foreign city. With the riches came a
rush of Egyptomania
. Sphinxes, rearing cobras, sun disks, acanthus leaves, hieroglyphs, proliferated throughout Rome. Lotus blossoms and griffins decorated even Octavian’s personal study. Cleopatra earned a second backhanded tribute: In her wake,
a golden age of women
dawned in Rome. High-born wives and sisters suddenly enjoyed a role in public life. They interceded with ambassadors, counseled husbands, traveled abroad, commissioned temples and sculptures. They become more visible in art and in society. They joined Cleopatra in the Forum. No Roman woman would ever attain the exalted status or enjoy the unprecedented privileges granted Livia and Octavia, which they owed to a foreigner, to whom they served as counterweight.
Livia
compiled a fat portfolio of properties, one that would include lands in Egypt and palm groves in Judaea. Octavia would go down in history as the un-Cleopatra, supremely modest, prudent, and pious.

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.
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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.
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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
Aeneid
in the decade after Cleopatra’s death; he put snakes in her wake even at Actium. She had no hope of faring well in a work read aloud both to Augustus and Octavia, as were portions of that epic poem. For the rest, her story would be shaped by a Roman she met once, in the last week of her life, who elevated her to a perilous adversary, at which altitude thick mists and obscuring myths settled comfortably around her. She counts among the losers whom history remembers, but for the wrong reasons.
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The mythmakers all aligned on one side. For the next century, the Oriental influence and the emancipation of women would keep the satirists in business.