Cleopatra and Antony (11 page)

As he had when he displayed Arsinoe, Caesar also misjudged when, as part of his African Triumph, he arranged for a float depicting Cato’s suicide to be drawn through the streets. It was usually considered bad taste to gloat over the defeat of fellow Romans, but Caesar’s justification was that Cato and those who had fought with him had been mere mercenary lackeys of King Juba. Their deaths, he argued, had been the just deserts of collaborators. The people of Rome wept openly at the representation of Cato’s lonely end, stoically ripping out his own guts. The infant son of the dead King Juba, another Juba, was also carried in the African procession and, as a child, was spared. Plutarch observed that “it was a highly fortunate captivity for him, since instead of being an uncultured Numidian, he came to be counted among the most learned writers of Greece.”
*

Among the many celebrations that Caesar arranged to accompany his Triumphs were five days of wild-animal shows. Such shows, which almost inevitably culminated in a hunt, or rather slaughter, of the exhibits, had a long history but had become ever more spectacular in the past few decades. Lions, ostriches (known for some reason to the wits in the audience as sea sparrows) and leopards (known as African mice) had been exhibited for some time as, of course, had bulls, bears and stags. More recent imports were hippopotamuses and crocodiles.
†
But Caesar, like his predecessors, strove to dream up ever more novel displays. Some of his spectaculars were achieved by sheer numbers—on one occasion he loosed four hundred snarling lions. He also delighted the crowds by producing creatures entirely new to them, being the first to import a giraffe, probably from Egypt. Another novelty was Thessalian bullfighting, where mounted riders chased the bull until the beast was so exhausted the riders could leap from their saddles, grip the bull’s horns and, in theory at least, with a quick twist break the bull’s neck.

Elephants had been shown for nearly a quarter of a century, and Romans felt very sympathetic toward them. At Pompey’s games in 55, some had escaped into the crowd and the spectators, excited by both pity for the beasts and fear for their own safety, had shaken their fists at Pompey. Cicero had written that there was “a feeling that the monsters had something human about them.” Rather than pitting elephants against other elephants or bulls, as was customary, Caesar fitted them with “castles,” presumably like howdahs, from which men fought as part of two contending armies in a mock battle involving five hundred infantry, thirty cavalry and twenty elephants. The battle was enacted in the Circus Maximus, from which, according to Suetonius, Caesar removed the central barrier around which the chariots ran to allow the camps to be pitched facing each other.

Another of Caesar’s innovations was a dramatic naval battle staged in a large pool on the Campus Martius in a swampy area near the Tiber where four thousand oarsmen and two thousand costumed warriors—gladiators and condemned prisoners—bloodily reenacted a naval battle. The games bored Caesar himself and, at the climax of a later spectacular, he was observed in his box pointedly attending to his government papers rather than watching. However, the crowds took a different view. According to Suetonius, “Such huge numbers of visitors flocked to these shows from all directions that many of them had to sleep in tents pitched along the streets or roads, or on rooftops; and often the pressure of the crowd crushed people to death. The victims included two senators.”

Some young men of the patrician classes even took part in the horse-riding events at the games, racing each other in the Circus Maximus. Each rode a pair of horses roped together, vaulting from one to the other at the end of every lap.
*
Not content with providing spectacular shows, Caesar feasted so many citizens as part of the celebrations that he had to provide twenty thousand couches.

In Rome, Cleopatra, her husband and their respective entourages were installed in mansions in the beautiful gardens of Caesar’s estate on the right bank of the Tiber. In the warmth of an Italian summer, less shatteringly hot than in her own more easterly capital, Cleopatra must have been hoping that this interlude would strengthen the emotional bonds between herself and Caesar. As she would have known, he was not a faithful man, and his opportunities for sexual encounters, even with queens, were legion. His affair with the beautiful Eunoe, queen of Mauretania, was the subject of common gossip and he had almost certainly been sleeping with her during his African campaign. But now it was Cleopatra with her diaphanous garments, rich jewels, compelling sexuality and agile intellect who could fill Caesar’s horizon and drive thoughts of other women from his mind.

Her armory of course included the child he had not yet seen—the boy whose paternity became the subject of avid speculation among Rome’s chattering classes. Caesar did not publicly acknowledge the boy as his own, though Antony would later claim that he had done so in private, but Cleopatra’s choice of name for him was a blatant statement to the world that he did nothing to deny. Perhaps she also hoped to become pregnant by Caesar again and give birth this time in Rome. The thoughts of Caesar’s childless wife of thirteen years, Calpurnia, living in their town house, about the arrival of the Egyptian queen and her son are unrecorded but can be guessed.

†Later, Nero had polar bears chasing seals.

*They rode bareback and, of course, without stirrups, which were not used in Europe until 750 years later.

CHAPTER 9

The power and ability to snub were enjoyable for a proud woman whose father had been a laughingstock in Rome, forced to go cap in hand to moneylenders. Among those offended by Cleopatra’s hauteur was Cicero, who had not taken an active part in the civil war but remained one of the most influential conservative figures now that the fight was once more being fought with words, not swords. “I hate the Queen,” he later wrote in a letter to his friend Atticus. “Her arrogance, when she was living across the Tiber in the gardens . . . I cannot recall without profound bitterness.” Yet even he acknowledged her erudition. She offered to obtain him some books from Alexandria, causing him to reflect that, despite the scandalous stories circulating about her in Rome, “her promises were all things that had to do with learning, and not derogatory to my dignity, so I could have mentioned them even in a public speech.” If politicians incurred Cleopatra’s contempt, she was generous to singers and musicians for creating the sophisticated, cultured ambience she was used to and appreciated in Alexandria.

Whether Antony visited Cleopatra’s salon in the fragrant gardens along the Tiber is unknown. He had anyway recently remarried. Having thrown out the wife—his cousin Antonia—he suspected of cuckolding him with Dola-bella, he had wed Fulvia, widow of the murdered tribune Clodius, whose bloodstained body she had so astutely and theatrically revealed to the mob.

After Clodius, Fulvia had married Curio, who, like Clodius, Antony and Fulvia herself, had once been a member of Rome’s fast young set. According to Cicero and others, he had also once been Antony’s lover. “No boy bought for the sake of lust was ever so much in the power of his master as you were in Curio’s,” wrote Cicero of Antony. Yet Curio had been equally besotted and had even offered to stand surety for Antony’s huge debts. Desperate to end an affair that had become the scandal of Rome, Curio’s father, who had repeatedly had Antony thrown out of his house, on Cicero’s advice bought Antony off, settling his debts himself, provided that the two young men parted.

Curio had been killed fighting for Caesar in Africa. Antony seemed to Fulvia a suitable—and malleable—replacement. So ambitious that Plutarch described how “a private citizen was beneath her notice—she wanted to rule magistrates and give advice to generals,” she schooled Antony carefully, restrained his excesses and encouraged him to be more single-minded in his pursuit of power than was his natural wont. When, in later years, Cleopatra took Antony as her lover, she “owed Fulvia the fee for teaching Antony to submit to a woman, since she took him over after he had been tamed and trained from the outset to obey women.”

Rome, unlike Alexandria, was an unplanned city, which had grown organically. At the time of Cleopatra’s visit it lacked the grandeur, grace and elegance of her own capital. Before the visitor reached the city itself, he passed the shantytowns where country people, lured to the city by free grain and constant amusements, had their dwellings. He also passed the great necropolises, where the ashes of the richer Romans were buried after their ceremonial cremations, since tradition prohibited burials within the city boundaries. Many of the necropolises were covered with graffiti either extolling or vilifying politicians. These crumbling tombs provided excellent cover for muggers and shelter for poor prostitutes, “those filthy sluts who conceal their trade in tombs.” The bodies of the poor were simply taken out of the city by night and tossed with all the other rubbish into huge pits near the Esquiline Gate. Here foraging animals, such as the wild gray wolves of Italy who reputedly suckled Romulus and Remus, disinterred them, gnawing the flesh and leaving piles of bones strewn along the roadside.

Rome itself was still built entirely on the east bank of the Tiber, but on the west bank were the premises of a mass of smoky, smelly industries banned from the city proper, partly because of their noxious fumes, partly because of the risk of fire. Among them were the making of matches, glassblowing and metalworking as well as tanning. The last relied on the copious use of human urine brought from the city in overflowing vats, which the tanners and fullers had positioned at convenient locations to attract those either too lazy to seek out the public toilets or too poor to pay the trifling fee they demanded.

After passing by the Campus Martius, the open space along the banks of the Tiber outside the walls that was used for large meetings and other public events, the visitor entered the city through one of the main gates in the walls. He was immediately confronted by a maze of rubbish-littered streets and alleys so narrow and winding that Caesar had introduced a law prohibiting wagons being driven along them during daytime; all porterage had to be on the backs of men or animals. If he needed to look for landmarks, perhaps on one of the seven hills, each between 100 and 150 feet high, around which everyone knew the city was constructed, the visitor’s line of sight was often blocked by the tenement buildings known as
insulae
or islands where most of Rome’s population, approaching a million people, lived. These five- or six-story tenement buildings cut off much of the sunlight from the narrow streets, usually had shops on the bottom floor, and were poorly and flimsily constructed, prone to fire and entirely without sanitation or running water. So many people simply emptied chamber pots from the upper stories on to the heads of passersby that a law had to be introduced regulating how much compensation those doused could claim. The wealthy Crassus had been one of the most unscrupulous developers of such tenements. Cicero still was. In a letter to Atticus he lamented that “two of my shops have collapsed and others are showing cracks so that even the mice moved elsewhere, to say nothing of the tenants.” But then he cheered up, reporting that he had “a building scheme underway which should turn this loss into a source of profit.”

Of the seven hills, the Capitol Hill was reserved for the gods and topped by the Temple of Jupiter. The smartest private addresses were on the Palatine Hill, where Cicero himself lived, though even here lack of space meant the gardens were small.
*
The Aventine Hill, opposite the Palatine, had a more mixed and bohemian population. In the broad valley between the two hills was the Circus Maximus—the oldest entertainment venue in Rome, supposedly first used for chariot racing in the time of the kings. Over the years, it acquired first wooden stands and then, in 329 BC, starting stalls for the chariots. Charioteers raced under the colors of factions such as the red or the white. Attendance could reach 250,000, still the largest crowd recorded at a sporting stadium. Circulating vendors kept the partisans well supplied with food and, in particular, drink. They roared each faction on and placed bets on the outcome.

The charioteer was a striking figure in his tunic in team colors, holding a long whip and a knife in his hand. The latter was used to cut the traces if he crashed, the only way he could save himself. Once the race started, he would lean out almost horizontally over his galloping horses. Four was the most common number but some races even involved chariots with ten horses. Races were over seven miles in distance and usually lasted a quarter of an hour. The trickiest moments were the tight turns, where the driver needed to seize the inside position, slow his team enough to make the turn and deny opponents any gap to squeeze through. Another of the driver’s skills was to crowd opposing chariots into one another in the hope of causing collisions, which were indeed frequent. There were rumors of charioteers being bribed to hold back their horses or of horses being doped by rivals. The races were particularly popular with the young since men and women were allowed to sit together and share the excitement, unlike in the theater and amphitheater, where they were segregated.

On the other side of the Palatine Hill, between it and the Capitol, was the Forum, the center of Rome’s political life, from where not only Rome but the whole of the Roman world was ruled. The Forum itself was paved with stone, was rectangular in shape and measured about 600 feet by 230 feet. Law cases were conducted outdoors in the Forum, whatever the weather. Although there was a Senate house, meetings of the Senate also took place in various of the buildings and temples grouped around the Forum and elsewhere. To the north was the assembly ground, where politicians addressed the people from a platform decorated with ships’ prows captured in a long-ago sea battle. The platform was given the name
rostra
, the plural of the Latin word for a ship’s prow.
*

To the southeast, the dwellings of the Vestal Virgins and of the chief priest, the pontifex maximus, at this time Caesar himself, were close together near the Temple of Vesta. Nearby, too, was a remnant of the past nearly as old as the reed shepherd’s hut said to be the birthplace of Romulus and Remus and still preserved amid the opulence of the Palatine. This was the palace of Rome’s former kings. Increasingly dwarfed by the surrounding buildings, it housed the official archives and calendar.

To the east of the Forum, in a valley between three other of Rome’s hills, was Suburia, where the Julian clan had its ancestral home and where Caesar himself had been born. Suburia was now an entertainment district, succinctly summed up by the poet Martial as a “seething, wakeful and clamorous” place where “hot chickpeas cost just a small coin, just like sex.” Here young bloods ate at fast-food stalls selling goat stew, sausages and bass “caught between the Tiber’s two bridges.” (This was not a particularly sanitary location since this was where the city’s great sewer, the Cloaca Maxima—still visible to this day on the riverbank and big enough for a man and a cart to drive through—discharged into the Tiber.) Later, one of the many fast women leaning from windows or sitting in bars and brothels might catch their eye. Some of the least expensive and most practical worked from what one visitor called “an alcove with a price list.”

Caesar’s new Forum was a long, open rectangle surrounded by porticoed colonnades and shops but, most significantly, at one of the short ends of the rectangle, Caesar constructed a temple to Venus the Mother (Genetrix), from whom he claimed divine descent. In making this dedication, he was fulfilling his vow to raise a sacred place to the goddess if she granted him victory over Pompey. However, near to the image of Venus herself, Caesar placed a magnificent gilt-bronze statue of his own living goddess—Cleopatra. Though the Ptolemies had long placed their images alongside their gods, in Rome such a step was unprecedented. That the honor had been given not to a Roman but to a foreigner and a woman caused shock, outrage and heightened speculation about Caesar’s intentions toward the Egyptian queen.

Caesar’s motives were probably mixed. He would have been mindful of the association of Venus with Isis and of Cleopatra’s claim to divine status as a reincarnation of the latter. Also, though there could have been no political imperative behind his placing of her statue in the temple and it did not change her official status, it allowed him to demonstrate to the people of Rome her importance to him personally as his lover and as the mother of his only son. This veneration of the child’s mother also seems clear confirmation that the child was indeed his, especially if recent research suggesting that the statue also incorporated a young Caesarion held on his mother’s shoulder is correct. A marble head of Cleopatra believed to date from between 40 and 30 and to be based on her statue in the Temple of Venus was discovered in the eighteenth century. Although the body on which the head is placed is not the original, indentations in the marble below Cleopatra’s left eye and just below the left corner of her mouth are consistent with where the fingers of Caesarion’s left hand would have rested had she been holding him on her right shoulder.
*

As Suetonius recorded, Caesar wanted all his projects to be “the biggest.” He planned a huge new theater to eclipse that built by Pompey in 55 when, using riches acquired in his eastern campaigns, Pompey had raised a stone theater on the Campus Martius. By placing a temple on the western rim he had cleverly bypassed a law banning stone as a construction material for places of entertainment. The prohibition seemingly derived from the lofty view that secular theaters were immoral places invented by Greeks and, if to be tolerated in Rome, should be made of less permanent material such as wood. Pompey’s theater complex, then the biggest in the world, was more than a thousand feet long and seated some seventeen thousand. Its revolutionary design became a template for future theaters, including the Coliseum a hundred years later. Unlike previous theaters, which were based on Greek precedents and dug into hillsides, Pompey used the Roman invention of concrete. His theater was freestanding and set on a foundation of barrel vaults ideal for providing access to the auditorium and stage. The seats rose in tiers above the vaults. Behind the stage was a large colonnaded courtyard, inside one of the halls of which stood a statue of Pompey surrounded by representations of the fourteen nations he had conquered. This hall was sometimes used for meetings of the Senate and would be on the ides of March just two years later. Caesar intended to build his own theater just west of the Capitol itself and began purchasing and clearing land, tearing down existing houses and temples.