Cleopatra and Antony (8 page)

Elsewhere in the city were the Great Theater, the huge colonnaded and porticoed six hundred-foot-long Gymnasium that stood in the center of the city to the south of the royal palaces, and an artificial hill “in the shape of a fir cone” built specifically to give a panoramic view of the great metropolis to residents and visitors alike who climbed up the pathway spiraling around it. Outside the city walls was the racetrack or hippodrome.
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The Alexandrians, as all the Egyptians, were highly skilled in waterworks of every kind. The network of canals around Alexandria was sophisticated and led eventually via the Nile and the Bitter Lakes through another narrow canal to a small port on the Red Sea known as Cleopatris, near the modern city of Suez, so that cargoes could traverse the country from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean by water. Alexandrians had also built an intricate system of interconnecting cisterns and aqueducts to supply fresh water since neither the lake nor canal water was fit to drink. Many of the cisterns were underground and their roofs were often supported by several series of thick stone columns.
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Caesar would have heard many languages on the spice-scented quays and in the bustling streets of Alexandria. The Macedonian Greek of the ruling classes vied with other dialects from the Greek islands and mainland and from Syracuse and other Greek settlements around the Mediterranean. The native populations, who congregated to the west of the city, spoke Egyptian; as their Macedonian rulers required, they were a minority in their capital despite increasing immigration from elsewhere in search of work and advancement as Alexandria grew. Roman legates, traders and military advisers conversed in Latin, while Persians, Syrians and Gallic and German mercenaries each used their own tongues.

Much Hebrew was also spoken. Alexandria had a large Jewish population—larger than any other city of the time with the exception of Jerusalem. Of the five “quarters” into which the city was divided, each designated by a letter of the Greek alphabet, the whole of one area (Delta), near the royal palace, and much of another (Beta), were occupied by Jews, and synagogues were scattered throughout the city. During the early days of the Museon, seventy Jewish scholars had been summoned by the Ptolemies to translate the Pentarch into Greek.
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Numerous Jewish people had fled to Alexandria after persecution by the Seleucids. They occupied a wide variety of positions, some in government, some as traders and some as soldiers in the polyglot Egyptian forces. Strabo described how the Jews had a great deal of autonomy: “A large part of the city of Alexandria has been set aside for them. They are presided over by an Ethnarch who governs the race, presides over the law courts and supervises contracts and ordinances just as if he was the supreme magistrate of an independent community.”

With more energy than common sense, Pothinus made plain that the Romans were not welcome. According to Plutarch, “his words and behavior towards Caesar were often rude and offensive.” The grain he sent to feed Caesar’s men was old and musty and he “told them to put up with it without complaining, since it was other people’s food they were eating.” He stirred up the already smarting population by ensuring that Ptolemy’s food was served up in crude wooden or chipped pottery dishes, implying that the rapacious Caesar and his men had grabbed all the household’s silver and gold platters for themselves.

As tensions within the palace grew, Cleopatra made her entrance. It is unclear whether Caesar had, as Plutarch suggests, ordered her to Alexandria like her brother or whether, guessing that her physical charms and personal charisma would be her best advocates, she had herself decided to plead her case in person. She would certainly have known of Caesar’s susceptibility to women, either by report or, if she had indeed accompanied her father to Rome, by what she had heard and observed there. Caesar, as appropriate for a supposed descendent of Venus, was a man of vigorous sexual appetites. A contemporary dismissed him as every man’s woman and every woman’s man and indeed, his youthful escapades notwithstanding, he was highly attracted to good-looking women. According to Suetonius, as his troops marched in triumph through the streets of Rome they celebrated his womanizing by singing such verses as:

Whatever her ultimate intentions, for Cleopatra the task of reaching Caesar was infinitely more difficult and dangerous than for her brother. Ptolemy’s forces stood between her and Alexandria, while his navy was blockading the city’s harbor. If captured, she would have been killed out of hand and her body quietly disposed of. Cleopatra’s solution was to stake everything on one stunningly audacious and theatrical stunt.

She slipped aboard a ship bound for Alexandria and, as it neared the city, transferred into a smaller craft with, as her sole companion, a loyal Greek merchant from Sicily named Apollodorus. In the purpling dusk their tiny vessel slunk into the harbor, where Apollodorus moored in the shadows and prepared to go ashore. He was a carrying a long cylindrical bag of the type used to transport bedclothes or carpets, secured with a leather strap. Somehow he managed to enter the royal palace, find his way to Caesar and deposit his burden at the Roman’s feet. Cleopatra extricated herself from the bag, uncoiling in fetching deshabille before the astonished and soon to be enamored Roman.

Their first encounter has fascinated generations. To the Roman poet Lucan, Cleopatra was a corrupt and calculating enchantress: “confiding in her beauty, Cleopatra approaches him, sad without any tears, arrayed for simulated grief as far as is consistent with beauty, as though tearing her dishevelled hair . . . her features aid her entreaties and her unchaste face pleads for her.” Her beauty was as fatal and ruinous to those who beheld it as Helen of Troy’s and “the hardy breast of Caesar caught the flame . . . in the midst of frenzy and the midst of fury, and in a palace haunted by the shade of Pompey.” Lucan blamed Cleopatra, not Caesar, for what happened next: “a night of infamy she passes, the arbitrator being thus corrupted.”

Lucan was right in one sense—Cleopatra’s sex appeal and power over men is beyond question—but she was probably not conventionally beautiful. Coins, albeit eroded with age, give the best idea of how she actually looked. Those minted in Alexandria and Ascalon early in her reign show a striking young woman with large eyes, full mouth, hooked nose and strong chin. Her abundant hair is drawn back from her face in the braids of the traditional Ptolemaic “melon coiffure”—so called because of the resemblance of the divided braids to the stripes on a melon rind—and finishing in a bun on the nape of her neck. Later coins depict a woman with high cheekbones, strong jaw and even more pronounced nose, whose face looks hawkishly powerful and far removed from the wide-browed, straight-nosed, placid-featured ideal of Roman beauty.

Some coins depict Cleopatra with so-called Venus rings—circles of fat on the neck. Obesity was certainly a characteristic of Cleopatra’s dynasty and representations of her ancestors show many were well fleshed. A model of Cleopatra in her late twenties, produced for this book by an expert in archaeological reconstruction using surviving coin images, statues and carvings of her, shows a voluptuously fleshy-faced woman with a broad forehead, hawkish nose, somewhat mannish cast of features, and more than a hint of a double chin, and offers an intriguing alternative vision of a woman more often thought of as lithe and gamine than as Rubenesque.
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Cleopatra had qualities rarer and more compelling than mere prettiness. Plutarch wrote that “according to my sources, her beauty was not of itself absolutely without parallel, not the kind to astonish those who saw her; but her presence exerted an inevitable fascination, and her physical attractions, combined with the persuasive charm of her conversation and the aura she sometimes projected around herself in company did have a certain ability to stimulate others. The sound of her voice was also charming.”

Clearly, Cleopatra’s erotic appeal was enhanced by an independent, self-reliant spirit and an agile, able mind. Her first language was Greek and this was probably the language in which she addressed Caesar—as an educated Roman, he would have been familiar with the lingua franca of the eastern Mediterranean. Yet Plutarch praised her extraordinary facility “which enabled her to turn her tongue, like a many stringed instrument, to any language she wanted, with the result that it was extremely rare for her to require an interpreter in her meetings with foreigners; usually she could answer their questions herself, whether they were Ethiopians, Troglodytae, Hebrews, Arabs, Syrians, Medes or Parthians. Unlike the previous rulers of her dynasty, she had also troubled to learn Egyptian.” In the Roman world intellectual and artistic accomplishments were much appreciated in a woman and thought to add to her attractions. Sallust wrote admiringly of a woman who possessed “intellectual strengths which are by no means laughable: the skill of writing verses, cracking jokes, speaking either modestly or tenderly or saucily—in a word, she had much wit and charm.” He could have been writing of Cleopatra as well.

One of Shakespeare’s characters observes that there was something of the gypsy about Cleopatra. In more recent times others have suggested that she had black African blood but there is no evidence of this other than in a symbolic sense of being an outsider in a male- and Roman-dominated world. She was, however, almost certainly dark-haired and olive-skinned. Though some of her early Macedonian forebears had been blond, they came of mixed stock. Also, intermarriage with the Seleucid dynasty had added Persian blood to the Ptolemaic dynasty, while Cleopatra’s paternal grandmother, a concubine whose name is unknown, was quite probably Syrian. Some historians believe that Cleopatra’s paternal grandmother was, in fact, Egyptian and base their claim that Cleopatra might have been black upon this. There is a precedent—an earlier Ptolemaic king took an Egyptian mistress. However, even if Cleopatra’s grandmother was Egyptian it does not follow that she was a black African.

Whatever her complexion, Cleopatra would have known how to make the best of herself. The Ptolemaic queens had long been celebrated for their expertise with perfumes and unguents. An early work on cosmetics has been attributed to Cleopatra and even if she was not its author, she could have been. She certainly would have paid careful attention to her appearance on this first meeting with Caesar, perhaps darkening her eyebrows and eyelids with antimony, adding a translucent luster to her skin with finely ground powders and reddening her lips with the juice of ripe mulberries. Rich musky perfumes would have added to the overall effect. Cleopatra must have seemed the embodiment of the eroticism and exoticism of the East and of glamour beyond royalty—after all, here at Caesar’s feet was not only a proud young queen, kin to Alexander the Great, but a living goddess—the representation of Isis on earth.

Cleopatra’s bold and imaginative act also appealed to Caesar on another level. He knew all about taking calculated all-or-nothing risks and admired courage in others. In a way, Cleopatra’s carpetbag stratagem had been her Rubicon, her opportunity to let the dice fly high. Had it failed she, like him, could have lost everything. Instead she had gambled and won. As Plutarch put it, “This ruse is said to have opened Caesar’s eyes to the side of Cleopatra that was far from innocent and to have made him fall for her.”

And fall for her he did. The young Egyptian queen and the seasoned Roman general became lovers, probably that very night, as Lucan claims, Cleopatra surrendering her virginity in a calculated act to secure her future. There seems no reason to doubt that she was still a virgin. Nothing suggests she had ever taken lovers and had the young Cleopatra been sexually promiscuous, Roman propagandists would have gratefully and gleefully reported it. At this stage in their relationship Caesar’s primary attraction for Cleopatra must have been his ability to help and protect her. Though fit and athletic, he was, at fifty-two, middle-aged. He had also, as his soldiers so raucously sang, lost most of his hair and he resorted to the usual fruitless methods of disguising it. Suetonius reported: “His baldness was a disfigurement which his enemies harped upon, much to his exasperation; but he used to comb the thin strands of hair forward from his poll and of all the honors voted him by the Senate and People, none pleased him so much as the privilege of wearing a laurel wreath on all occasions—he constantly took advantage of it.”