Cleopatra: A Life (5 page)

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
Iliad
. No text more thoroughly penetrated Cleopatra’s world. In an age infatuated with history and calibrated in glory, Homer’s work was the Bible of the day. He was the
“prince of literature
”; his 15,693 lines provided the moral, political, historical, and religious context, the great deeds and the ruling principles, the intellectual atlas and moral compass. The educated man cited him, paraphrased him, alluded to him. It was entirely fair to say that children like Cleopatra were—as a near contemporary had it—
“nursed in their learning
by Homer, and swaddled in his verses.” Alexander the Great was believed to have slept always with a copy of Homer under his pillow; any cultivated Greek, Cleopatra included, could recite some part of the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
by heart. The former was more popular in Cleopatra’s Egypt—it may have seemed a more pertinent tale for a turbulent time—but from an early age she would have known literarily what she at twenty-one discovered empirically: there were days you felt like waging war, and days when you just needed to go home.

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 theirs paled, and with whose theirs intersected; the border between the human and divine was fluid for Cleopatra. (The schoolroom lessons merged again with her personal history in the study of Alexander, the other preeminent classroom hero. Cleopatra would have known his story backward and forward, as she would have known every exploit of her Ptolemaic ancestors.) The early
questions were formulaic, the brain fundamentally more retentive. Memorization was crucial. Which gods aid whom? What was Ulysses’s route? This was the kind of material with which Cleopatra’s head would have been stuffed; it passed for erudition in her day. And it would not have been easy to evade. The royal entourage included philosophers, rhetoricians, and mathematicians, at once mentors and servants, intellectual companions and trusted advisers.

While Homer set the gold standard, a vast catalogue of literature followed. Clearly the rollicking domestic dramas of Menander were a classroom favorite, though it is equally clear that the comic playwright was less read later. Cleopatra knew her Aesop’s fables, as she would have known her Herodotus and Thucydides. She read more poetry than prose, though it is possible she knew the texts we read today as Ecclesiastes and 1 Maccabees. Among playwrights Euripides was the established favorite, subtly suited to the times, with his stable of transgressive women who reliably supply the brains of the operation. She would have known various scenes by heart. Aeschylus and Sophocles, Hesiod, Pindar, and Sappho, would all have been familiar to Cleopatra and the clique of well-born girls at her side. As much for her as for Caesar, there was little regard for what was not Greek. She probably learned even her Egyptian history from three Greek texts. Some schooling in arithmetic, geometry, music, and astrology and astronomy (the last two largely indistinguishable) accompanied her literary studies—Cleopatra knew the difference between a star and a constellation, and she could likely strum a lyre—though all were subordinate to them. Even Euclid could not answer the student who had asked what precisely the use for geometry might be.

Cleopatra tackled none of those texts on her own. She read aloud, or was read to by teachers or servants. Silent reading was less common, in public or private. (A twenty-sheet-long scroll of papyrus was both unwieldy and fragile. Reading was very much a two-handed operation: you balanced the scroll in your right hand and rolled the used portion with your left.) Either a grammarian or a retinue of them worked with
her on decoding her first sentences, a vexed assignment in a language transcribed without word breaks, punctuation, or paragraphs. For good reason, sight reading was considered an accomplishment, the more so as it was meant to be done with verve and expression, careful enunciation, and effective gestures. At thirteen or fourteen, Cleopatra graduated to the study of rhetoric or public speaking—along with philosophy, the greatest and most powerful art, as her brother’s tutor had amply demonstrated on Pompey’s arrival. Theodotus may at one time have been Cleopatra’s tutor as well. She would have had a dedicated tutor, most likely a eunuch.

The rhetoric master worked the real magic. Though less so for girls, Cleopatra’s was a speechifying culture, appreciative of the shapely argument, of the fine arts of persuasion and refutation. One declaimed with a codified vocabulary and an arsenal of gestures, in something of a cross between the laws of verse and those of parliamentary procedure. Cleopatra learned to marshal her thoughts precisely, express them artistically, deliver them gracefully. Content arguably took second place to delivery, “for,” noted Cicero, “
as reason is the glory of man
, so the lamp of reason is eloquence.” Head high, eyes bright, voice carefully modulated, she mastered the eulogy, the reproach, the comparison. In terse and vigorous language, summoning a wealth of anecdote and allusion, she would have learned to discourse on a host of thorny issues: Why is Cupid depicted as a winged boy with arrows? Is country or town life preferable? Does Providence govern the world? What would you say were you Medea, on the verge of slaughtering your children? The questions were the same everywhere although the answers may have varied. Some queries—“Is it fair to murder your mother if she has murdered your father?” for one—may have been handled differently in Cleopatra’s household than elsewhere. And despite the formulaic quality, history quickly crept into the exercises. Soon students would debate whether Caesar should have punished Theodotus, he of the dead-men-don’t-bite coinage. Was Pompey’s murder actually a gift to Caesar? What of the question of honor? Should Caesar have killed Ptolemy’s adviser to avenge
Pompey, or would doing so suggest that Pompey had not deserved to die?
^*
Would war with Egypt be wise at such a time?

These arguments were to be made with particular and exact choreography. Cleopatra was instructed as to where to breathe, pause, gesticulate, pick up her pace, lower or raise her voice. She was to stand erect. She was not to twiddle her thumbs. Assuming the raw material was not defective, it was the kind of education that could be guaranteed to produce a vivid, persuasive speaker, as well as to provide that speaker with ample opportunity to display her subtle mind and clever wit, in social settings as much as in judicial proceedings.
“The art of speaking
,” it was later said, “depends on much effort, continual study, varied kinds of exercise, long experience, profound wisdom, and unfailing strategic sense.” (It was elsewhere noted that this grueling course of study lent itself equally to the court, the stage, or the ravings of a lunatic.)

Cleopatra neared the end of her training just as her father succumbed to a fatal illness, in 51. In a solemn ceremony before Egypt’s high priest, she and her brother ascended to the throne, probably late that spring. If the ceremony conformed to tradition, it took place in Memphis, Egypt’s spiritual capital, where a sphinx-lined causeway led through dunes of sand to the main temple, with its limestone panthers and lions, its Greek and Egyptian chapels, painted in glowing color and hung with brilliant banners. Amid clouds of incense Cleopatra was fitted with the serpent crowns of Upper and Lower Egypt by a priest in a long linen gown, a panther’s skin slung across his shoulder. She took her oath within the sanctuary, in Egyptian; only then was her diadem fitted into place. The new queen was eighteen, Ptolemy XIII eight years younger. Generally hers was a precocious age. Alexander the Great was a general at sixteen, master of the world at twenty. And as was observed later in connection with Cleopatra,
“Some women are younger
at seventy than most women at seventeen.”

How she fared is plain to see. The culture was oral. Cleopatra knew how to talk. Even her detractors gave her high marks for verbal dexterity. Her
“sparkling eyes”
are never mentioned without equal tribute to her eloquence and charisma. She was naturally suited to declaim, with a rich, velvety voice, a commanding presence, and gifts both for appraising and accommodating her audience. On that count she had advantages Caesar did not. As much as Alexandria belonged to the Greek world, it happened to be located in Africa. At the same time, it was in but not of Egypt. One journeyed between the two as today one journeys from Manhattan to America, though with a swap of languages in the ancient case. From the start Cleopatra was accustomed to playing to dual audiences. Her family ruled a country that even in the ancient world astonished with its antiquity. Its language was the oldest on record. That language was also formal and clumsy, with a particularly difficult script. (The script was demotic.
Hieroglyphs
were used purely for ceremonial occasions; even the literate could decipher them only in part. Cleopatra was unlikely to have been able to read them easily.) It made for a far more demanding assignment than Greek, by Cleopatra’s day the language of business and bureaucracy, and which came easily to an Egyptian speaker. While Egyptian speakers learned Greek, it was rare that anyone ventured in the opposite direction. To the punishing study of Egyptian, however, Cleopatra applied herself. She was allegedly the first and only Ptolemy to bother to learn the language of the 7 million people over whom she ruled.