Cleopatra: A Life (6 page)

The accomplishment paid off handsomely. Where previous Ptolemies had commanded armies through interpreters, Cleopatra communicated directly. For someone recruiting mercenaries among Syrians and Medians and Thracians that was a distinct advantage, as it was to anyone with imperial ambitions. It was an advantage as well closer to home, in a restive, ethnically diverse, cosmopolitan city, to which immigrants flocked from all over the Mediterranean. An Alexandrian contract could involve
seven different nationalities
. It was not unusual to see a Buddhist monk on the streets of the city, home to the largest community of Jews outside
Judaea, a community that may have accounted for nearly a quarter of Alexandria’s population. Egypt’s profitable luxury trade was with India; lustrous silks, spices, ivory, and elephants traveled across the Red Sea and along caravan routes. There was ample reason why Cleopatra should have been particularly adept in the tongues of the coastal region. Plutarch gave her nine languages, including Hebrew and Troglodyte, an Ethiopian tongue that—if Herodotus can be believed—was
“unlike that of
any other people; it sounds like the screeching of bats.” Cleopatra’s rendition was evidently more mellifluous.
“It was a pleasure
merely to hear the sound of her voice,” notes Plutarch, “with which, like an instrument of many strings, she could pass from one language to another; so that there were few of the barbarian nations that she answered by an interpreter; to most of them she spoke herself.”

Plutarch is silent on the subject of Cleopatra’s Latin, the language of Rome, little spoken in Alexandria. Remarkable orators both, she and Caesar certainly communicated in
a very similar Greek
. But the linguistic divide spoke volumes about the bind in which Cleopatra now found herself, as it did about her legacy and her future. A generation earlier, a good Roman had avoided Greek wherever possible, going so far even as to feign ignorance.
“The better one gets
to know Greek,” went the wisdom, “the more a scoundrel one becomes.” It was the tongue of high art and low morals, the dialect of
sex manuals
, a language
“with fingers of its own.”
The Greeks covered all bases, noted a later scholar,
“including some I should not care
to explain in class.”
^*
Caesar’s generation, which perfected its education in Greece or under Greek-speaking tutors, handled both languages with equal finesse, with Greek—by far the richer, the more nuanced, the more subtle, sweet, and obliging tongue—forever supplying
the
mot juste
. From the time of Cleopatra’s birth, an educated Roman was a master of both. For a fleeting moment it seemed as if a Greek-speaking East and West might just be possible. Two decades later, Cleopatra would negotiate with Romans who were ill at ease in her language. She would play her last scene in Latin, which she certainly spoke with an accent.

An aesthete and a patron of the arts under whom Alexandria enjoyed the beginnings of an
intellectual revival
, Auletes saw to it that his daughter received a first-rate education. Cleopatra would continue the tradition, engaging a distinguished tutor for her own daughter. She was not alone in doing so. While girls were by no means universally educated, they headed off to schools, entered poetry competitions, became scholars. More than a few well-born first-century daughters—including those not being groomed for thrones—went far in their studies, if not all the way to rigorous rhetorical training. Pompey’s daughter had a fine tutor and recited Homer for her father. In his expert opinion, Cicero’s daughter was
“extremely learned.”
Brutus’s mother was equally well versed in her Latin and Greek poets. Alexandria had its share of female mathematicians, doctors, painters, and poets. This did not mean such women were above suspicion. As always, an educated woman was a dangerous woman. But she was less a source of discomfort in Egypt than elsewhere.
^*
Pompey’s beautiful wife, Cornelia, only yards away when her husband’s head was hacked off at Pelusium—she had shrieked in horror—had a similar formation to Cleopatra’s. She was
“highly educated
, played well upon the lute, and understood geometry, and had been accustomed to listen with profit to lectures on philosophy; all this, too, without in any degree becoming unamiable or pretentious, as sometimes young women do when they pursue such studies.” The admiration was grudging, but it was admiration all the same. Of a Roman consul’s wife it was conceded, shortly after Cleopatra introduced herself to Caesar that fall, that for all her dangerous gifts
“she was a woman
of no mean
endowments; she could write verses, bandy jests, and use language which was modest, or tender, or wanton; in fine, she possessed a high degree of wit and of charm.”

TO CAESAR, THEN
, Cleopatra was in some ways profoundly familiar. She was also a living link to Alexander the Great, the exquisite product of a highly refined civilization, heir to a dazzling intellectual tradition. Alexandrians had been studying astronomy when Rome was little more than a village. What was reborn with the Renaissance was on many fronts the Alexandria that Cleopatra’s forebears had built. Somehow despite the years of savagery and the vacuous Macedonian cultural record, the Ptolemies established in Alexandria the greatest intellectual center of its time, one that had picked up where Athens had left off. When Ptolemy I had founded
the library
he had set out to gather every text in existence, to which end he made considerable progress. His gluttony for literature was such that he was said to have seized all texts arriving in the city, on occasion returning copies in their stead. (He also offered rewards for contributions. Spurious texts materialized in the Alexandrian collection as a result.) Ancient sources indicate that the great library included 500,000 scrolls, which would appear to be a hopeless exaggeration; 100,000 may be closer to the truth. In any event the collection dwarfed all prior libraries and included every volume written in Greek. Those texts were nowhere more accessible, or more neatly arranged—ordered alphabetically and by subject, they occupied individual cubbies—than in the great library of Alexandria.

Nor were those texts in any danger of collecting dust. Attached to the library, near or within the palace complex, was the museum, a state-subsidized research institute. While teachers elsewhere in the Hellenistic world were held in little esteem—
“he’s either dead
or off teaching somewhere” went the expression; a teacher earned slightly more than an unskilled laborer—scholarship reigned supreme in Alexandria. So did this community of scholars, cosseted by the state, housed tax-free in luxurious quarters, fed in a vast communal dining hall. (Such was true anyway
until a hundred years before Cleopatra, when her great-grandfather decided he had had enough of that politically obstreperous class and thinned the ranks, dispersing the best and the brightest across the ancient world.) For centuries both before and after Cleopatra the most impressive thing a doctor could say was that he had trained in Alexandria. It was where you hoped your children’s tutor had studied.

The library was the pride of the civilized world, a legend in its lifetime. By Cleopatra’s day it was no longer in its prime, its work having devolved from original studies to the kind of manic classifying and cataloguing that gave us the seven wonders of the world. (One bibliographical masterwork catalogued “Those Persons Eminent in Every Branch of Learning,” with alphabetical lists of their writings, divided by subject. The study swelled to 120 volumes.) The institution continued all the same to attract the great minds of the Mediterranean. Its patron saint was Aristotle, whose school and library stood as its model, and who had—not incidentally—taught both Alexander the Great and his childhood friend, Ptolemy I. It was in Alexandria that the circumference of the earth was first measured, the sun fixed at the center of the solar system, the workings of the brain and the pulse illuminated, the foundations of anatomy and physiology established, the definitive editions of Homer produced. It was in Alexandria that Euclid had codified geometry. If all the wisdoms of the ancient world could be said to have been collected in one place, that place was Alexandria. Cleopatra was its direct beneficiary. She knew that the moon had an effect on tides, that the Earth was spherical and revolved around the sun. She knew of the existence of the equator, the value of pi, the latitude of Marseilles, the behavior of linear perspective, the utility of a lightning conductor. She knew that one could sail from Spain to India, a voyage that was not to be made for another 1,500 years, though she herself would consider making it, in reverse.

For a man like Caesar, then, highly cultivated, in thrall to Alexander the Great and who claimed descent from Venus, all roads—mythical, historical, intellectual—led to Alexandria. Like Cleopatra his education
was first-rate, his curiosity voracious. He knew his poets. He was an omnivorous reader. Though the Romans were said to have no taste for personal luxury, Caesar was, as in so many matters, the exception. Even on campaign he was an insatiable collector of mosaic, marble, and gems. His invasion of Britain had been written down to his
fondness for freshwater pearls
. Seduced by opulence and pedigree, he had lingered in Oriental courts before, to his lifelong embarrassment. Few charges disconcerted him as did the accusation that he had prolonged his stay in what is today northern Turkey because of his affair with the king of Bithynia. Caesar was of illustrious birth, a gifted orator, and a dashing officer, but those distinctions were meaningless compared to a woman who, however inventively, descended from Alexander, who was in Egypt not only royal but divine. Caesar was very nearly deified in the last years of his life. Cleopatra was born a goddess.

And her looks? While the Romans who preserved her story assure us of Cleopatra’s wanton ways, her feminine wiles, her ruthless ambition, and her sexual depravity, few raved about her beauty. That was not for lack of adjectives. Sublime women enter the historical record. Herod’s wife was one. Alexander the Great’s mother was another. The Sixth Dynasty queen thought to have built the third pyramid was, as Cleopatra would have known,
“braver than all the men
of her time, the most beautiful of all the women, fair-skinned with red cheeks.” Arsinoe II—the thrice-married third-century intriguer—was stunning. Beauty had unsettled the world before; the Helen allusion was there for the asking, but
only one Latin poet
picked up on it, primarily to emphasize Cleopatra’s bad behavior. Plutarch clearly notes that her beauty
“was not in itself
so remarkable that none could be compared with her, or that no one could see her without being struck by it.” It was rather the “contact of her presence, if you lived with her, that was irresistible.” Her personality and manner, he insists, were no less than “bewitching.” Time has done better than fail to wither in Cleopatra’s case; it has improved upon her allure. She came into her looks only years later. By the third century AD she
would be described as
“striking,” exquisite
in appearance. By the Middle Ages, she was
“famous for nothing
but her beauty.”

As no stone portrait of her has yet proved authentic, André Malraux’s quip remains partly true: “Nefertiti is a face without a queen; Cleopatra is a queen without a face.” All the same a few matters can be resolved. It would have been surprising had she been anything other than small and lithe, although the men in the family tended toward fat, if not full-fledged obesity. Even allowing for the authoritarian message she intended to broadcast and for cut-rate engraving, coin portraits support Plutarch’s claim that she was by no means a conventional beauty. She sported a smaller version of her father’s hooked nose (common enough that there is a word for it in Greek), full lips, a sharp, prominent chin, a high brow. Her eyes were wide and sunken. While there were fair-haired, fair-skinned Ptolemies, Cleopatra VII was very likely not among them. It is difficult to believe that the world could have nattered on about “that Egyptian woman” had she been blond. The word “honey-skinned” recurs in descriptions of her relatives and would presumably have applied to her as well, despite the inexactitudes surrounding her mother and paternal grandmother. There was certainly Persian blood in the family, but even an Egyptian mistress is a rarity among the Ptolemies. She was not dark-skinned.

Certainly her face did nothing to undermine her redoubtable charm, her easy humor, or her silken powers of persuasion; Caesar was particular about appearances. For him there were other considerations as well. It had long been clear that the way into Pompey’s heart was through flattery, the way into Caesar’s through bribery. He spent freely and beyond his budget. One mistress’s pearl cost the equivalent of what 1,200 professional soldiers earned in a year. After more than a decade of warfare, he had an army to pay. Cleopatra’s father had left an outstanding debt, which Caesar spoke of recouping on his arrival. He would forgive half, which left an astronomical balance of some 3,000
talents
. He had extravagant expenses and extravagant tastes, but Egypt had, Caesar knew, a
treasury to match. The captivating young woman before him—who spoke so effectively, laughed so easily, hailed from an ancient, accomplished culture, moved amid an opulence that would set his countrymen’s teeth on edge, and had so artfully outfoxed an army—was one of the two richest people in the world.

On his return to the palace the other was horrified to discover his sister with Caesar. He stormed out, to throw a temper tantrum in the street.