Cleopatra: A Life (7 page)

VERY LITTLE ABOUT
the first century BC was original; mostly it distinguished itself for its compulsive recycling of familiar themes. So it was that when a fiery wisp of a girl presented herself before an adroit, much older man of the world, credit for the seduction fell to her. For some time already that brand of encounter had occasioned the clucking of tongues, as it would for several millennia. In truth it is unclear who seduced whom, just as it is unclear how quickly Caesar and Cleopatra fell into each other’s arms. A great deal was at stake on both sides. Plutarch has the indomitable general helpless before the beguiling twenty-one-year-old. He is in two swift steps
“captivated
” by her ruse and “overcome” by her charm: Apollodorus came, Caesar saw, Cleopatra conquered, a sequence of events that does not necessarily add up in her favor. In his account—it may well derive from Plutarch’s, which preceded it by a good century—Dio too acknowledges Cleopatra’s power to subjugate a man twice her age. His Caesar is instantly and entirely enslaved. Dio allows, however, for a hint of complicity on the part of the Roman, known to harbor a fondness for the opposite sex
“to such an extent
that he had his intrigues with ever so many other women—with all, doubtless, who chanced to come his way.”
This is to grant Caesar something of a role rather than to leave him defenseless in the hands of a devious, disarming siren. Dio offers too a more elaborate staging. In the palace Cleopatra has time to primp. She appears “in the most majestic and at the same time pity-inspiring guise,” a rather tall order. His Caesar is a convert “upon seeing her and hearing her speak a few words,” words that Cleopatra surely chose with great care. She had never before met the Roman general and had little idea what to expect. She would have known only that—in a worst-case scenario—it was preferable to be taken prisoner by Julius Caesar than by her own brother.
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By all accounts Cleopatra came easily to some sort of accommodation with Caesar, who was soon enough acting “as advocate for the very woman whose judge he had previously assumed to be.” The seduction may have taken some time, or at least longer than the one night of legend; we have no proof that the relationship was immediately sexual. By the clear light of day—if not necessarily the morning after the unorthodox, showstopping arrival—Caesar proposed a reconciliation between Cleopatra and Ptolemy,
“on the condition
that she should rule as his colleague in the kingdom.” This was by no means what her brother’s advisers were expecting. They had the upper hand.
They assumed that they had signed
a pact with Caesar on the beach at Pelusium. Nor were they banking on Cleopatra’s unaccountable appearance in the palace. Young Ptolemy was if anything more surprised to find her there than Caesar had been. Furious to have been outwitted, he resorted to behavior that suggested he very much needed a consort: He burst into tears. In his rage he flew through the gates and into the crowd outside. Amid his subjects, he tore the white ribbon from his head and cast it to the ground, wailing that his sister had betrayed him. Caesar’s men seized and returned him to the palace, where he remained under house arrest. It took them longer to quiet the violence in the street, much encouraged in
the weeks to come by Pothinus, the eunuch, who had led the move to depose Cleopatra. Her glorious career would have ended here had she not secured Caesar’s favor. Assaulted as he was by both land and sea, Caesar might have ended his here as well. He believed he was settling a family vendetta, did not understand that, with two bedraggled and
depleted legions
, he had incited a full-scale rebellion. Nor does Cleopatra appear to have enlightened him as to her lack of support among the Alexandrians.

Apprehensive, Caesar arranged to appear before the people. From a safe place—it seems to have been an upper-story balcony, or a window of the palace—he
“promised to do
for them whatever they wished.” Here the well-honed rhetorical skills came in handy. Cleopatra may have briefed Caesar on how to appease the Alexandrians but he needed no tutor to deliver a clear, compelling oration, one he typically punctuated with vigorous hand gestures. He was an acknowledged genius in that realm, a pitch-perfect speaker and a lapidary stylist, unsurpassed in the
“ability to inflame
the minds of his hearers and to turn them in whatever direction the case demands.” He made no reference later to his alarm, focusing instead on his negotiation with Ptolemy and asserting that he was himself
“particularly anxious
to play the part of friend and arbitrator.” He appeared to succeed. Ptolemy agreed to a reconciliation, no great concession as he knew that his advisers would fight on regardless. They were at that moment secretly summoning the Ptolemaic army back to Alexandria.

Caesar thereafter convoked a formal assembly, to which both siblings accompanied him. In his high nasal tones, he read aloud Auletes’ will. Their father, he pointed out, had plainly directed Cleopatra and her brother to live together and rule in common, under Roman guardianship. Caesar thereby bestowed the kingdom on them. It is impossible not to see Cleopatra’s hand in what came next. To prove his goodwill (or, as Dio saw it, to calm an explosive crowd), Caesar went further. He bestowed the island of Cyprus on Cleopatra’s two remaining siblings, seventeen-year-old Arsinoe and twelve-year-old Ptolemy XIV. The gesture was significant. The pearl of the Ptolemaic possessions, Cyprus commanded
the Egyptian coast. It supplied the Egyptian kings with timber and afforded them a near monopoly on copper. Cyprus also represented a sore spot in Ptolemaic history. Cleopatra’s uncle had ruled the island until a decade earlier, when Rome had demanded exorbitant sums from him. He chose poison over payment. His property was collected and carted off to Rome, where it was paraded through the streets. In Alexandria his older brother, Cleopatra’s father, had stood by silently, for which craven behavior his subjects had furiously expelled him from Egypt. Cleopatra was eleven at the time. She was unlikely to have forgotten either the humiliation or the revolt.

Caesar succeeded in calming the populace but failed to defuse hostilities so far as Pothinus was concerned. The ex-tutor lost no time in stirring up Achillas’s men. The Roman proposal, he assured them, was a sham. Did they not happen to glimpse Cleopatra’s long, lovely arm behind it? There is some kind of perverse testimony to be read in the fact that Pothinus—who knew her well, intimately if indeed he had taught her—feared the young woman as much as he did the seasoned Roman. He swore that Caesar
“had given the kingdom
ostensibly to both the children merely to quiet the people.” As soon as he could, he would transfer it to Cleopatra alone. A second danger lurked as well, as indicative of Cleopatra’s resolve as of Ptolemy’s lack of it. What if—while confined with him in the palace—that devious woman managed to seduce her brother? The people would never oppose a royal couple, even one sanctioned by an unpopular Roman. All would then be lost, insisted Pothinus. He devised a plan, which he evidently shared with too many of his coconspirators. At the banquet held to celebrate the reconciliation, Caesar’s barber—there was a reason barbershops served as post offices in Ptolemaic Egypt—made a startling discovery. That
“busy, listening fellow
,” ever inquisitive, learned that Pothinus and Achillas meant to poison Caesar. While they were at it, they plotted Cleopatra’s murder as well. Caesar was not surprised: He had been sleeping sporadically and at odd hours to protect himself against assassination attempts. Cleopatra too must have found the nights uneasy, no matter how vigilant her guards.

Caesar ordered a man to dispense with the eunuch, which was done. For his part Achillas focused more intently on what was to become, in Plutarch’s understated estimation, “a troublesome and embarrassing war.” Caesar had four thousand men, hardly fresh or in any shape to feel invincible. Achillas’s force was five times as great and marching toward Alexandria. And no matter what hints Cleopatra may have offered, Caesar had an insufficient grasp of the depths of Ptolemaic guile. Under the young king’s name, Caesar dispatched two emissaries with a peace proposal. They were men of stature and experience. Both had served effectively under Cleopatra’s father; Caesar had very likely met them earlier in Rome. Achillas—whom Caesar acknowledged to be
“a man of remarkable nerve”
—read the overture for the weaker hand it was. He murdered the ambassadors before they could so much as deliver their message.

With the arrival of Egyptian troops in the city, Achillas attempted to break into Caesar’s quarters. Frantically, under cover of darkness, the Romans fortified the palace with entrenchments and a ten-foot wall. Caesar might well be blockaded, but he did not care to fight against his will. He knew that Achillas was recruiting auxiliary troops in every corner of the country. Meanwhile the Alexandrians established vast munitions factories throughout the city; the wealthy outfitted and paid their adult slaves to fight the Romans. Skirmishes erupted daily. Mostly Caesar worried about water, of which he had little, and food, of which he had none. Already Pothinus had pressed the point by delivering musty grain. As ever, the successful general was the gifted logician; it was essential that Caesar neither be separated from nor vulnerable to Lake Mareotis, south of the city and its second port. That brilliant blue freshwater lake connected Alexandria by canals to Egypt’s interior; it was as rich and important as the two Mediterranean harbors. On the psychological front there were additional considerations. Caesar did everything he could to court the young king, as he understood
“that the royal name
had great authority with his people.” To all who would listen he broadcast regular reminders that the war was not Ptolemy’s but that of his rogue advisers. The protests fell on deaf ears.

While Caesar tended to supply lines and fortifications, a second plot hatched in the palace, where the atmosphere must already have been strained, at least among the feuding siblings. Arsinoe too had a clever tutor. That eunuch now arranged her escape. His coup suggests either that Cleopatra was negligent (highly improbable under the circumstances), preoccupied with her brother and her own survival, or astutely double-crossed. It is unlikely that she underestimated her seventeen-year-old sister.
Arsinoe burned with ambition
; she was not the kind of girl who inspired complacency. She clearly had no great faith in Cleopatra, which sentiment she had presumably kept to herself for weeks.
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Outside the palace walls she was more vocal. She was a Ptolemy not in thrall to a foreigner, precisely what the Alexandrians preferred. They declared her queen—every sister had now had a turn—and rallied exuberantly behind her. Arsinoe assumed her position at Achillas’s side, at the head of the army. In her rooms at the palace, Cleopatra had further reason to believe it wiser to trust a Roman than a member of her own family. This, too, was old news by 48 BC.
“One loyal friend
,” Euripides reminds us, “is worth ten thousand relatives.”

IN THE YEAR
of Cleopatra’s birth, Mithradates the Great, the Pontic king, suggested an alliance to his neighbor, the king of the Parthians.
^†
For decades Mithradates had hurled insults and ultimatums at Rome, which he felt was systematically gobbling up the world. The scourge was now coming their way, he warned, and
“no laws, human or divine
, prevent them from seizing and destroying allies and friends, those near them and those far off, weak or powerful, and from considering every government which does not serve them, especially monarchies, as their
enemies.” Did it not make sense to band together? He was unwilling to follow in the mincing steps of Cleopatra’s father. Auletes was “averting hostilities from day to day by the payment of money,” Mithradates scoffed; the Egyptian king might think himself cunning but was only delaying the inevitable. The Romans pocketed his funds but offered no guarantees. They had no respect for kings. They betrayed even their friends. They would destroy humanity or perish in the process. Over the next two decades they indeed proceeded to dismantle large portions of the vast Ptolemaic Empire, events Cleopatra must have followed closely. Cyrene, Crete, Syria, Cyprus, were long gone. The kingdom she would inherit was barely larger than it had been when Ptolemy I had installed himself on the throne two centuries earlier. Egypt had lost its
“fence of client states”
; Roman lands now surrounded it on all sides.

Mithradates correctly surmised that Egypt owed its continued autonomy more to mutual jealousies in Rome than to Auletes’ gold. Paradoxically, the country’s wealth prevented its annexation, a question first broached in Rome, by Julius Caesar, when Cleopatra was seven. Competing interests held the discussion in check. No one faction wished for any other to seize control of so fabulously rich a kingdom, the ideal base from which to overthrow a republic. For the Romans Cleopatra’s country remained a perennial nuisance, in the words of a modern historian
“a loss if destroyed
, a risk to annex, a problem to govern.”