Cleopatra the Great (28 page)

Yet superb sculpted images of Cleopatra were certainly created during her time in Rome, where she sat for sculptors both Roman and Greek as they attempted to capture her likeness in marble and metal. Although some have doubted if any of these likenesses survived, at least two such heads exist which represent Cleopatra when she resided in Rome; both are made of imported Greek marble and closely resemble her coin portraits. And, though both are uninscribed in the manner of most ancient portraits, in first-century
BC
Rome there would have been no mistaking who this woman was.

Chief among them was ‘a beautiful image' which Caesar himself set up at the very heart of the city. Having vowed to his divine ancestor that if she brought him victory against Pompeius he would build a new temple in her honour, he fulfilled his vow with a temple dedicated to ‘Venus Genetrix', ‘Venus who brings forth life', bringing the ancestress of the Julian house directly into his plans. He selected his new temple's statuary with the utmost care in order to demonstrate his policies publicly. The temple was fronted by an antique statue of Bucephalus, Alexander's favourite horse, to which Caesar added his own figure as rider, literally in the saddle as Alexander's successor. Behind this most eloquent of equestrian statues, a flight of steps ascended to a high podium of Corinthian columns, beyond which lay Venus' gleaming shrine housing a spectacular collection of sparkling gems and cameos. In their midst stood a superb statue of Venus commissioned from the Greek sculptor Arcesilaus, adorned with a pectoral-like breastplate of the choicest British pearls and Cleopatra's gift of her own pearl necklace. Yet the tableau was only completed when Caesar added the finishing touch, ‘a beautiful image of Cleopatra by the side of the goddess'.

Played down by some historians as little more than a ‘polite' gesture, this blatant move has been described by others as ‘open acknowledgement of marriage between a descendant of a prestigious dynasty and the daughter of a god'. Figurines of Venus were traditionally presented to brides at marriage, and this life-size golden version may well have been Caesar's very public announcement about his relationship with Cleopatra and his dynastic intentions. But whereas the Ptolemies had always set up statues of themselves and their families alongside those of the gods in their temples, this was certainly not the case in Republican Rome where living individuals were never portrayed in this way. And as a statue giving divine authority to a woman in the very centre of their city, it was political dynamite.

Although the original gold statue of Cleopatra disappeared long ago, it was copied in yellow-toned Parian marble sometime between 46-44
BC,
ending up in the second-century
AD
statuary collection of the wealthy Quintili brothers in their villa on the Appian Way. Now known as the ‘Vatican Head' after its current home, it was long believed to represent a Roman priestess until it was noticed her ‘infula' ritual headband was actually the broad diadem of the later Ptolemies. Its large eyes and small mouth were very similar to those found on Cleopatra's coin portraits, and the head, despite its lack of nose, was finally identified as Cleopatra in 1933.

With her braided hair set in the melon coiffure, a clue that this might just be a copy of Caesar's original gold statue of Cleopatra was the appearance of a small nodule over the forehead that the Roman sculptor who copied the original didn't quite understand. It may have been meant to represent ‘a lotus crown or uraeus, or even the remains of a large knotted lock of hair', most likely a type of lampadion ‘topknot' as featured on a first-century
BC
marble head of a woman from Pompeii's Isis temple, or even a stylised version of Alexander's own distinctive raised lock of hair over the brow. A second detail that the copyist was unsure about was a kind of blemish on its left cheek which may once have been the traces of a child's fingertip. Equating Cleopatra with Aphrodite-Venus, the child on the original statue was likely to have been Caesarion as Eros-Cupid in the same mother-and-son pairing used on Cleopatra's Cypriot coinage, in which her infant son looks up towards her face.

The second such head of Cleopatra, just under life-size and again made in Rome of the same Parian marble, was found in a villa along the Appian Way south of the city. The abrasive action of a chemical cleaner applied at some stage has produced a soft-focus, vulnerable quality not shared by the more denned features of the Vatican Head, creating a ‘slightly more flattering portrayal' about which male scholars seem particularly enthusiastic. As ‘perhaps the finest and most beautiful portrait sculpture' of all Ptolemaic rulers, eventually bought by Berlin's Antikensammlung, the Berlin Head ‘speaks for itself... it is infinitely more beautiful than the unflattering coin portrait, and it does convey an image of the great queen's personality'. Two further male commentators give the same rave reviews of its ‘great physical beauty'. A less effusive female opinion claims that ‘whilst it does not flatter her, it bears a close relationship to the portraits of Alexander the Great', and the head does indeed demonstrate a slight tilt in a mirror image of Alexander, whose well-known images tend to show his head tilted slightly to the left. The Berlin Head once again shows the hair gathered up in the melon coiffure topped by a diadem; tiny curls frame the face, while the same small tuft of hair over the brow seems to replicate Alexander's distinctive locks.

There is even a third life-size head of Parian marble which presents a stylised image of a Ptolemaic royal female of divine status. Wearing the same vulture headdress and tripartite wig of echeloned curls portrayed in Cleopatra's Egyptian temple reliefs and duplicated on gold signet rings perhaps worn by the pro-Caesar faction, this image, known as the Capitoline Head', most likely reflects the period when Living Isis resided in Rome as partner to the warrior Caesar. Certainly Isis had a strong military dimension for the Romans: ‘Isis-Victoria' was equated with both Venus Victrix and Rome's national war goddess Bellona, partner of war god Mars. And when Rome's main Isis temple on the Capitoline Hill was destroyed by order of the Senate in 48
BC
, Caesar and Cleopatra may well have outlined plans for a new Isis temple to be rebuilt on Mars' sacred site, the Campus Martius. The resulting ‘Iseum Campense' completed a few years later housed all manner of Egyptian-inspired statuary and pieces imported from Egypt, some discovered as recently as 1987.

Caesar's image too was now erected in temples as part of a policy of self-promotion backed by the Senate, which voted him ‘temples, altars and divine images and a priest of his own cult'. One particular statue of Caesar, dedicated ‘to the Unvanquished God', lifted its title from a statue of Alexander in Athens. So Caesar's message could really not have been clearer — he was the new Alexander, his partner Cleopatra was Alexander's living successor and their son Caesarion, conceived in Alexander's own city, would succeed them both in a new world order.

Nor was it a coincidence that this particular statue of Caesar as god was placed in the temple of the deified Romulus, founder of Rome, a city inaugurated back in 753
BC
but which still paled against the opulent cities of the East. So Caesar took it upon himself to transform the eternal city by diverting part of the vast wealth obtained from his military successes into a grandiose programme of redevelopment.

Having learned much from his time in Egypt, a land sustained by its knowledge of hydraulics, Caesar planned to reroute the river Tiber and create an artificial harbour at its mouth to give Rome direct access to the sea. Surely inspired by the Fayum's vast reclamation scheme, he also planned a canal to drain the Pontine marshes in order to reduce the incidence of malaria which affected the city every summer and autumn. The vast quantities of grain produced on the agricultural land gained by draining the Fayum almost certainly influenced his decision to drain the Fucine Lake, east of Rome, to increase the amount of arable land and make Rome more self-sufficient. For in such a small city with almost one million inhabitants and ‘as crowded, probably, as modern Bombay or Calcutta,' Rome's daily grain dole to 320,000 people was unsustainable. So as well as increasing local grain supplies, Caesar decided to send many of the unemployed claimants to other parts of Italy and some to Greece, including Corinth. That city's fortunes as a trading centre would be revived by his ambitious scheme to cut a canal through the Isthmus of Corinth, the shortest route between the Ionian and Aegean seas and most likely influenced by Egypt's trade-enhancing canal between the Nile and Red Sea.

As Cleopatra and her advisers assisted Caesar in developing his grand designs, the old brick-built city of Rome began to give way to a marble-clad metropolis modelled on Alexandrian lines. Caesar's new Forum of Julius, incorporating his imposing temple of Venus and its gold statue of Cleopatra, was officially opened in 46
BC
. The nearby Basilica of Julia, named after his daughter, housed Rome's law courts within the same magnificent porticoes as Alexandria's Gymnasion. As Cleopatra visited such sites beneath the fine linen drapes of her royal canopy, plans were drawn up for a new election building on the Campus Martius measuring an astonishing mile in circumference, together with the world's largest theatre beside the Tarpeian Rock on the Capitoline Hill; both followed Alexander's practice of dominating with scale and were ultimately based on the same colossal Egyptian architecture which had so impressed Caesar.

Yet the most lasting area in which Cleopatra influenced Caesar was their mutual passion for scholarship and, despite recent stock depletions during the Alexandrian War, Cleopatra still owned the world's largest library. It was surely with her advice that Caesar envisaged similar facilities for Rome, having appointed a head librarian the year he returned from Egypt, 47
BC
. The librarian was given a remit to collect copies of all the Greek and Latin works in existence, a task which required direct cooperation with Alexandria.

Having so emphatically affected Rome's culture, religion, politics and even its landscape, Cleopatra also provided Caesar with the means to shift time. In a move which still regulates the Western world — albeit with minor modifications by the Pope in 1582 — Cleopatra's astronomers presented Caesar with the Egyptian calendar to replace their defective Roman version. Egypt had invented the 365-day year, their ancient solar calendar of 360 days provided with an extra five days added at the end of each year to bring it into line with the movement of the sun. Each temple's astronomer priest ensured that the rites and festivals were performed at exactly the right moment by using a combination of astronomical observation, obelisks, sundials and a sophisticated mechanical water clock invented by an Alexandrian barber-turned-engineer. The Alexandrian scholars had also refined the ancient Egyptian calendar by taking on board the calculations of Kallippus of Cyzicus, a colleague of Aristotle, who had reformed the Greek calendar in 330
BC
by harmonising the solar and lunar calendars using information gleaned by Alexander's scholars in Babylon.

By contrast, Rome's 355-day lunar-based calendar involved the insertion of an extra month every other year to produce the annual average year of 366 days; the excess day was eliminated if the extra month was left out of the calendar every twenty years. But since the Roman priests who monitored such complexities had failed to do their job during Caesar's long absences in Gaul during the fifties
BC,
Rome's calendar had gradually drifted two months ahead of the seasons. So when it was a summery July the calendar read an autumnal September, and with festivals now falling at inappropriate times Cleopatra's advisers were fortunately on hand to correct this serious discrepancy.

Under the guidance of her astronomer royal, Sosigenes, Rome's unwieldy lunar calendar was discarded in favour of Egypt's more straightforward solar version. It became known as the Julian Calendar and was made up of 365 days, with an extra day added every four years to create what is now known as a leap year. The fifth month, Quinctilis, was renamed ‘Mensis Julius' or July in honour of Caesar's birthday, which was publicly celebrated in the manner of Eastern rulers.

In order to introduce their new calendar on 1 January 45
BC
, Caesar and Sosigenes added two extra months between November and December in 46
BC
as a one-off measure. This made 46
BC
the longest year on record at an astonishing 445 days, so Cleopatra's stay in Rome became rather more lengthy than the simple dates ‘46-44
BC
' would suggest. The extension also had serious political ramifications, since those in annual office remained in power for longer.

But as Rome's entire way of life was being transformed by the vision of one man under the influence of not just a foreigner, or even a woman, but a monarch too, die-hard Republicans were already discussing ways to put an end to the reforms. Rumours circulated that Rome was no longer good enough for Caesar, that he wanted to transfer the government to Alexandria and even make himself a monarch alongside his foreign partner. It must have been clear that the couple, who appeared openly together in Rome, regarded themselves as married regardless of Roman law and Caesar's existing marriage to Calpurnia, particularly as Caesar was drawing up legislation to amend his marital status by making it legal for him to have more than one marriage.

Yet, regardless of the changes afoot in Rome, the civil war rumbled on as Pompeius' sons hiding out in Spain continued to evade all attempts to deal with them. So once more the task fell to Caesar, and although details of Cleopatra's whereabouts at this time were later destroyed, along with almost every other description of her time in Rome, she may well have returned briefly to attend to Egypt's affairs when Caesar left for Spain in November 46
BC
.