Cleopatra: A Life (58 page)

STACY SCHIFF
is the author of
Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov),
winner of the Pulitzer Prize;
Saint-Exupéry,
a Pulitzer Prize finalist; and
A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America,
winner of the George Washington Book Prize and the Ambassador Book Award. Schiff has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. The recipient of an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Schiff has contributed to
The New Yorker,
the
New York Times,
and the
Washington Post
, as well as many other publications. She lives in New York City.

A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America

Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov)

Saint-Exupéry: A Biography

*
Even the fiction writers cannot agree about Caesar and Cleopatra. He loves her (Handel); he loves her not (Shaw); he loves her (Thornton Wilder).

*
As they have done since time immemorial.
“And the endeavor
to ascertain these facts was a laborious task, because those who were eyewitnesses of the several events did not give the same reports about the same things, but reports varying according to their championship of one side or the other, or according to their recollection,” grumbled Thucydides, nearly four hundred years before Cleopatra.

*
Ptolemy XIII surveyed the murder from the beach but for his part in it earned a permanent place in Dante’s ninth circle of hell. He keeps company with Cain and Judas.

*
They were not alone. By one account, Alexander the Great consulted a famed oracle about his parentage. He had some questions, which is what happens when your mother is said to have mated with a snake. Wisely he left his entourage outside the temple and submitted a bribe in advance: he was, the oracle assured him, the son of Zeus.

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Given the congested genealogy, Ptolemy VIII was Cleopatra’s great-grandfather three times over—and twice her great-great-grandfather.

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Alexander the Great’s family included two Cleopatras, his father’s last wife and a sister two years Alexander’s junior. Both were murdered by family members.

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It is also unclear whether she was Cleopatra’s mother, although if Cleopatra were illegitimate it is unlikely that that detail would have escaped her detractors.

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Theodotus escaped but was tracked down. By the time he began to figure in classroom discussions he had been crucified.

*
The history parallels that of French on American soil. In colonial America, the language of the dissolute Old World was a vehicle of contagion; where French went, depravity and frivolity were sure to follow. By the nineteenth century, French was the indispensable agent of high culture, fuller of expression, richer of vocabulary, somehow maddeningly superior in its nuance and suppleness. At its edges the admiration bordered on resentment, to which it finally succumbed. An eventful century later, French was outmoded, long-winded, largely irrelevant, an affectation.

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The Hellenistic version of pregnant-and-barefoot-in-the-kitchen was a Roman epithet:
“She loved her husband
, she bore two sons, she kept the house and worked in wool.”

*
Neither account was written from living memory. In only one version—
a blundering sixth-century AD account
—does anyone venture to make the shocking assertion that Caesar might have seduced Cleopatra.

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We know nothing of Arsinoe’s motives, which has not discouraged even the best modern interpreter of the Alexandrian War from speculation: Had she not felt jealous of her older sister’s masterful seduction of Caesar, asserts one historian,
“She would not have been
a woman.”

†
Parthia is today northeastern Iran. The Pontic kingdom extended from the southern shore of the Black Sea into modern Turkey.

*
To the Romans the Egyptian worship of animals was unspeakably primitive and perverse. A second-century Christian took a different view. By comparison with the Greek gods, the Egyptian deities fared well.
“They may be irrational animals
,” conceded Clement of Alexandria, “but still they are not adulterous, they are not lewd, and not one of them seeks for pleasure contrary to its own nature.”

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Their fervor was lost on later Romans. As Dio would write centuries afterward, the Alexandrians were
“most ready to assume
a bold front everywhere and to speak out whatever may occur to them, but for war and its terrors they are utterly useless.”

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At the same time it is interesting that the general who continues Caesar’s narrative takes such care to emphasize—on his first page and curiously out of context—that the city was fireproof. His assertion contradicts the other early sources, which claim that fire spread from the ships to the docks to the great library. It fails to acknowledge too the masterfully manipulated roofs and beams or the timber barricades of Caesar’s account. We are left with a
gratuitous apology
, and without an offense.

*
The gift was welcome but the timing was awkward. Julia had been set to marry Quintus Servilius Caepio in a matter of days. He was most displeased. In her place, Pompey offered Caepio his own daughter, although she, in turn, was already engaged to someone else. For the most part Roman women were for horse trading, an idea that—for all their creative family machinations—rarely occurred to the Ptolemies.

*
One modern historian goes so far
as to suggest they expressly covered it up.

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The Sphinx was almost certainly invisible to Caesar and Cleopatra, buried still in sand, as it had been for nearly a thousand years.

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The most common graffito:
“I saw, and I was amazed.”

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Like so much else in her life—
the Nile cruise
, the Roman stay, her good faith at Actium—the paternity of this child and the timing of his birth have been contested. His appearance seemed too good and too opportune to be true. Otherwise the skeptics’ case rests on Caesar’s presumed infertility. Despite a vigorous sex life, he had sired no progeny in thirty-six years. As early as Suetonius the paternity issue was raised; there is a curious silence in the record where one might expect outrage, and, too, an absence of material evidence. That silence can be read equally as affirmation: the birth was so distasteful, the evidence that Cleopatra had hoodwinked Caesar so great, that it was wise to keep the matter quiet. Caesar certainly thought the child his, as did both Antony and Augustus.

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Sounding some familiar, inaccurate notes, a historian of Cleopatra’s day credited Isis with Egypt’s upside-down social hierarchy. In deference to her great wisdoms, claimed Diodorus, the Egyptians had ordained that
“the queen should have greater power
and honor than the king, and that among private persons the wife should enjoy authority over her husband, the husbands agreeing in the marriage contract that they will be obedient in all things to their wives.”

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The one exception has been shown to have been the police. Though Greek at the higher level and Egyptian at the lower, they made for an egalitarian force, uncommonly efficient and responsive, on occasion even reprimanding officials. They took the law seriously. They also worked more or less autonomously, considerately relieving the Ptolemies of concerns with
“stolen donkeys
and assaults on grandmothers.”

*
On
one contemporary list
Cleopatra appears as the twenty-second richest person in history, well behind John D. Rockefeller and Tsar Nicholas II, but ahead of Napoleon and J. P. Morgan. She is assigned a net worth of $95.8 billion, or more than three Queen Elizabeth IIs. It is of course impossible accurately to convert currencies across eras.

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The good king was advised to stay home. The poor resented his absence, while—obliged to accompany him—the rich felt forced into exile.

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As Seneca observed:
“Easier for two philosophers
to agree than two clocks.”

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Plutarch deemed the future King Juba
“the most fortunate captive
ever taken,” as fate transported him from his “barbarian” land to Rome, where he was educated. He emerged as an eminent historian who wrote on a variety of subjects, from Roman antiquity to mythology to the behavior of elephants.

*
Some took Cicero’s distaste further. If a man was an excellent piper, it followed that he was a worthless man.
“Otherwise he wouldn’t be so good
a piper,” notes Plutarch, quoting approvingly. The axiom did not work to the advantage of Cleopatra’s father. Despite ample evidence to the contrary, he would be written off as
“not a real man
, but a pipe-player and a charlatan.”

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The prevailing ethos is preserved in the literature. In the
Iliad,
women are the most perfect things in creation. They are also, as has been observed, as a general rule
“teasing, scolding
, thwarting, contradicting, and hoodwinking.” In the Greek plays, women have the key parts. There are few outsize female heroines in Roman literature, in which wives come in two varieties: the tyrannical rich and the spendthrift poor. Roman literature is notably short as well on deceived husbands, a comic staple from Aristophanes to Molière.

*
As Blaise Pascal asserted in the seventeenth century: “Had Cleopatra’s nose been shorter, the whole face of the world would have been changed.”

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Many have marveled at the tale, but only one man has sacrificed Tiffany pearls to a laboratory investigation of it. Does a pearl actually disintegrate in vinegar? Yes, if very slowly, reported B. L. Ullman, who in the end resorted to heat to nudge his 1956 experiment along:
“When I boiled a pearl
for 33 minutes the vinegar boiled off while I was reading a detective story. I can still smell that vinegar. The pearl seemed not to be affected, though I thought it looked a trifle peaked.” He got better results with stronger vinegar, the best results with pulverized pearl, which dissolved after three hours and twenty minutes of closely monitored boiling. This is the kind of thing to which Cleopatra has driven scholars. To the question of
why
Cleopatra (or anyone) might have attempted such a display in the first place—surely it made more dramatic sense to swallow the gem whole?—Ullman reminds us that pearls consist primarily of carbonate of lime, the ancient world’s bicarbonate of soda. They make an effective, if expensive, antacid.

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He was unapologetic, the more so as he was in the midst of his grief feverishly productive. He defied those “happy souls” who begrudged him his mourning to so much as read half the pages that he, in his misery, had written.

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There was
plenty of precedent
for this brand of inexactitude. Alexander the Great threw a festival to celebrate his conquest of India, which doubtless surprised the bedraggled, half-starved men who had barely survived that mission, having accomplished no such thing.

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This happened by necessity in the best of families, Plutarch assures us, monarchy being
“so utterly unsociable
a thing.” The rules for dispensing with fellow royals were, he held, as inflexible as those of geometry.

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Florence Nightingale was among those who marveled at the parallels between the Osiris and Christ stories. In Upper Egypt she sat spellbound through a Sunday morning in an Isis temple, one largely decorated by Cleopatra’s father. Few places had felt to her so sacred:
“I cannot describe
to you the feeling at Philae,” she wrote her family in 1850. “The myths of Osiris are so typical of our Saviour that it seemed to me as if I were coming to a place where He had lived—like going to Jerusalem; and when I saw a shadow in the moonlight in the temple court, I thought, ‘perhaps I shall see him: now he is there.’ ”

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She would be accused of having withheld distributions from the city’s Jews, which is unlikely. Customarily the Jews were loyal supporters of the female Ptolemies. They were river guards, police officers, army commanders, and high-ranking officials. They had fought for Auletes; they numbered among Cleopatra’s supporters in the desert in 48. And they had fought for her during the Alexandrian War, at the end of which Caesar had granted them citizenship.

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To complicate matters, there were both assassins and would-be assassins, who—the French Resistance fighters of their day—enlisted after the fact. Also to complicate matters, Lepidus and Cassius were brothers-in-law. Both were related by marriage as well to Brutus.

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A truly eloquent man is the one who can argue both sides of a case with equal finesse.
“And so, if by chance
you find anyone who despises the sight of beautiful things,” Cicero noted in the same speech, “whom neither scent nor touch nor taste seduces, whose ears are deaf to all sweet sounds—such a man I, perhaps, and some few will account heaven’s favorite, but most the object of its wrath.” As it happened, Cicero lived in one of the grandest mansions in the grandest quarters of Rome, for which he had paid an astronomical sum. And while he was pleased that one of his villas had
“an air of high
thinking that rebukes the wild extravagance of other country houses,” he had to admit that an addition to it would be awfully nice.