Cleopatra the Great (16 page)

After originally training for the priesthood Caesar became a lawyer. Sent east on a mission to Bithynia, near Pontus, he returned as something of a dandy inspired by Hellenistic fashions. It was said that ‘his dress, it seems, was unusual: he had added wrist-length sleeves with fringes to his purple-striped senatorial tunic, and the belt which he wore over it was never tightly fastened — hence Sulla's warning to the aristocratic party “Beware of that boy with the loose clothes”.'

By contrast, he became well known for his plain speaking. Once his rather high-pitched delivery had been improved by a speech coach from Rhodes, Caesar became a great orator, emphasising his points by vigorous gesticulation. Even the hypercritical Cicero was moved to ask, ‘Do you know of any man who, even if he has concentrated on the art of oratory to the exclusion of all else, can speak better than Caesar? Or anyone who makes so many witty remarks? Or whose vocabulary is so varied and yet so exact?'

On his way to study in Rhodes, Caesar had been kidnapped by Cilician pirates who put a ransom of twenty talents on his head. Claiming to be worth at least fifty, he told the pirates that once free he would track them down and kill them; this caused much amusement among his captors, who let him go on payment of the ransom. Unfortunately for them, the twenty-six-year-old Caesar had been serious and set great store by keeping his word. He obtained some ships, caught up with the pirates and executed them by the standard Roman method of crucifixion — albeit cutting their throats as an act of mercy because they had treated him well.

Following a spell of military experience for which he received the oak wreath for valour, Caesar joined the staff of the millionaire general Crassus. After the death of his first wife whom he honoured with a public obituary, most unusual for a Roman woman, Caesar married Pompeius' cousin Pompeia and was posted to Spain, where the sight of Alexander the Great's statue at the port of Gadir (Cadiz) made him deeply despondent. Comparing his own achievements at the age of thirty-two with those of Alexander who had already conquered much of the known world, Caesar also felt upstaged by Pompeius who had taken Alexander's epithet ‘Great' and most of the east.

Yet Caesar had decided on an alliance and, marrying his daughter Julia to Pompeius, joined with him and his old boss Crassus to form the first Triumvirate in 60
BC
. As effective rulers of Rome, they sold the title ‘friend and ally of the Roman people' to Cleopatra's father Auletes, and when he was deposed the following year Caesar decided to try his luck there.

But when he failed to be elected Governor-General of Egypt he went instead to Gaul in an attempt to pacify the unruly northern parts, make a name for himself, compete with Pompeius — and plunder with impunity.

In his own accounts Caesar dispassionately describes his encounters with a whole host of peoples, from the ferocious Suebi of Germany, whose elaborately tall hairstyles enhanced their stature in battle, to the Gallic religious leaders he termed ‘druides', an elite ruling class he equated with the Roman Senate. He also produced the first eyewitness account of Britain, a land in such unchartered territory that many Romans doubted it even existed.

Yet Caesar may well have known that the Greek sailor Pytheas had circumnavigated Britain in the 320s
BC,
and with his subsequent account ‘On the Ocean' housed in Alexandria's royal library and familiar to its head librarian Eratosthenes, at least one Ptolemaic merchant ship had traveled to ‘Britannike' in the second century
BC
.

In his account, written as always in the third person, Caesar claimed to have invaded Britain in August 556
BC
‘because he knew that in almost all the Gallic campaigns the Gauls had received reinforcements from the Britons. Even if there was no time for a campaign that season, he thought it would be of great advantage to him merely to visit the island, to see what its inhabitants were like, and to make himself acquainted with the lie of the land, the harbours and the landing-places' — not to mention its rumoured sources of pearls, a commodity for which Pompeius had already received great plaudits in Rome.

Disembarking at Walmer in Kent in August 55
BC
, Caesar and 10,000 troops were met by the locals, armed and ready in chariots, with bristling hair and their bodies stained with blue woad plant dye ‘which gives them a more terrifying appearance in battle'. It was also well known that the Celts, like the Thracians, severed the heads of fallen enemies, and in a practice not unfamiliar to Kleopatra's relatives, ‘embalm in cedar-oil and carefully preserve in a chest, and these they exhibit to strangers'.

Consisting of little more than a fortnight in Kent, this first invasion had largely been a means of winning support in Rome where it proved an incredible propaganda success. As the first time the Roman army had successfully ventured into unchartered territory, the senate voted a twenty-day period of thanksgiving, the longest ever awarded a Roman general.

Spurred on by his success, Caesar initiated plans for a repeat performance the following year. Some of his ships were pounded to pieces by the waves off the Kent coast, as they had been on the first occasion, but with the reinforcement came tragic news. His daughter Julia had died giving birth to Pompeius' child, Caesar's grandchild, which itself survived for only a few days. Although Pompeius had wanted to bury them on one of his lavish estates, the crowds had intervened and given Julia a great cremation on the Field of Mars as a gesture to her popular father.

In typical fashion, Caesar took the news stoically, revealing little of the grief he must have expressed in private and pressing on with matters at hand as a welcome distraction. After taking a major hill fort near St Albans in late July, he heard that rebellion had again broken out in Gaul, so moved back to the coast. From here he wrote up his report and sent a number of letters back to Rome. Knowing full well that whatever he told the gossip-loving Cicero would be swiftly relayed to everyone else, Caesar described his time in the land with ‘astonishing masses of cliff, noting the island's supplies of iron, tin, beef and grain.

Caesar finally left Britain in late September, accepting the surrender of the tribal leader Cassivellaunus and taking hostages and tribute, including freshwater pearls which ‘he weighed with his own hand to judge their value'. Both his British invasions had been a massive PR success, even if his critics claimed there had been little plunder. Despite the freshwater pearls, Cicero told his friends that there wasn't a single ounce of silver in Britain and he doubted whether any of the British slaves had any literary or musical taste. Yet the fair appearance and blue-stained skin of these ‘sky-blue Britons' did cause a minor fashion craze as Roman ladies tried to replicate their ‘azure beauty'.

With a third of Rome's population made up of slaves, Caesar himself took pains to buy the best: ‘So high were the prices he paid on slaves of good character and attainments that he became ashamed of his extravagance and would not allow the sums to be entered in his accounts'. He was also able to provide many of his troops with a slave each following the surrender of Gaul, but news of the terrible massacres which had accompanied his conquests of Gaul and Germany was seized on by his opponents in Rome. They demanded he face trial as a war criminal until his huge territorial gains overruled such concerns. Yet, unlike many of his accusers, Caesar had little racial prejudice and numbered Gauls amongst his associates.

In the manner of Alexander, Caesar ‘always led his army, more often on foot than in the saddle', advising them to ‘keep a close eye on me!' and expecting them to follow. Again like his hero, he was extremely popular with his troops whom he addressed as ‘comrades', as opposed to other Roman leaders who felt the term too familiar. He judged his men for their fighting abilities rather than their morals and allowed them to relax off duty however they wished, answering critics by claiming that, ‘My men fight just as well when they are stinking of perfume'. Yet he did expect them to be well turned out. As a well-known dandy himself, his customized toga with eastern-style fringing which echoed Alexander's penchant for foreign attire was complemented by a number of rings, and he also liked to wear the wreaths of laurel or oak leaves awarded for military successes. Apart from displaying his status, they disguised his thinning fair hair more effectively than his usual method. For ‘he used to comb the thin strands of his hair forward from his poll' since his baldness was ‘a disfigurement which his enemies harped upon, much to his exasperation'.

Yet despite a receding hairline and thirty-year age gap, the man who appeared to Cleopatra that night in Alexandria as she pulled back her veil was still ‘tall, fair and well built with a rather broad face and keen dark brown eyes'. There was clearly a sexual attraction between them, and given Caesar's incredibly promiscuous track record it seems highly unlikely that the two simply shook hands. Having done her homework, Cleopatra had already ‘discovered his disposition which was very susceptible, to such an extent that he had his intrigues with ever so many women — with all, doubtless, who chanced to come his way'.

For in addition to his one betrothal and marriages to Cornelia and Pompeia, he had next married Calpurnia, daughter of the influential and very wealthy Lucius Calpurnius Piso. He also maintained a long-term relationship with Servilia, mother of the staunch young Republican Brutus, and ‘his affairs with women are commonly described as numerous and extravagant: among those of noble birth who he is said to have seduced were Servius Sulpicius' wife Postumia; Aulus Gabinius' wife Lollia; Marcus Crassus' wife Tertulla; and even Gnaeus Pompeius' wife Mucia'. The wives of his closest colleagues were a valuable source of information to him. Yet he divorced his second wife, Pompeia, after she herself was alleged to be having an affair. Her lover's attempts to infiltrate Caesar's house, heavily disguised as a woman, caused such a scandal that Caesar claimed he had little choice but to terminate the marriage, since ‘Caesar's wife must be above suspicion'.

With no such qualms himself, there were claims of him fathering children as far away as Gaul. His soldiers were so proud of their leader's reputation that whenever they returned to Rome they marched along to the strains of their favourite ditty: ‘Home we bring our bald whoremonger, Romans lock your wives away! All the bags of gold you lent him went his Gallic tarts to pay!' In Spain, he made the acquaintance of numerous local women in the company of his like-minded chief of staff, who went by the delightful nickname of ‘Mentula', ‘Penis'. Persistent rumours surrounding Caesar's time in Bithynia claim that he even had an affair with its king, Nicomedes. The details were salaciously relayed by Cicero: ‘Caesar was led by Nicomedes' attendants to the royal bedchamber, where he lay on a golden couch, dressed in a purple shift ... So this decendant of Venus lost his virginity in Bithynia'. His troops found this most amusing, as did, the young poet Catullus, calling Caesar a ‘pansy Romulus' until his father made him apologise.

Yet despite his well-deserved reputation as ‘every woman's husband and every man's wife', most Romans would remember the episode in which their noble general was the one who was seduced. Claiming that Cleopatra had entered the palace ‘without Caesar's knowledge — the disgrace of Egypt, promiscuous to the harm of Rome', they ignored the fact that she was simply returning to her own home. Running with their theme of ‘lecherous prostitute queen', they described her as a woman ‘worn among her own household slaves'. As their stories grew in the telling, ‘she became so debauched that she often sold herself as a prostitute; but she was so beautiful that many men bought a night with her at the price of their own death'; reluctant to dismiss such lurid images, modern accounts still claim that Cleopatra had ‘the power of the courtesan — and she exploited it professionally'.

Although the recent claim that Cleopatra was ‘willing to use her body to gain her political ends' is intriguingly never made of Caesar or indeed any other male leaders, political matters of an intimate nature were certainly high on his agenda that night. It may well be that as a descendant of Aeneas of Troy, forefather of Rome, whose steamy romance with the North African ruler Dido of Carthage was an entente cordiale he wished to revive, Caesar was obviously attracted to Cleopatra's status as one of the very few surviving descendants of Alexander the Great. And as a prominent
philalexandrotatos
, ‘lover of Alexander', Caesar no doubt fancied his chances with his hero's equally attractive descendant. As dreams of future dynasties may already have emerged in their increasingly intimate conversation, the two figures were certainly drawn together by their precarious situation and, both effectively trapped within the palace, became the closest of allies within a single night.

Recognising Cleopatra's abilities in all their forms, Caesar swiftly reversed Pompeius' recommendation that she be excluded from the throne and before the morning she was fully reinstated. Since Caesar himself states simply that he ‘was particularly desirous of settling the disputes of the princes [sic] as a common friend and arbitrator', many historians seem to doubt that he had any romantic attachment to her. They support their claim with the fact that he rarely mentions her in his official commentaries, only twice by name and even then in the third person; but this ignores another fact, that Caesar always wrote in the third person and in the same objective style. Since his words were intended as propaganda, gushing prose would have been highly inappropriate and he never revealed his emotions in his work.

So Caesar's feelings for Cleopatra must be sought in his actions, and these speak volumes. Knowing full well that the Alexandrians had no desire to have her back, because their feelings had been stirred up by Potheinos and were reinforced by Ptolemy XIII's forces who greatly outnumbered his, Caesar took a massive gamble reinstating her. When her brother arrived at Caesar's suite the following morning and saw his despised sister relaxing in the Roman's company, the young pharaoh was so incensed that he rushed from the palace and tore off his diadem, dashing it to the ground in a dramatic display of teenage rage. No doubt encouraged by Potheinos, he shouted that he had been betrayed, rousing up the ever-predictable Alexandrians who once more prepared to storm the palace.