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Stacy Schiff Cleopatra A Life Biography — page 1

Stacy Schiff Cleopatra A Life Biography — page 2

Contents

ABOUT THE BOOK

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ALSO BY STACY SCHIFF

TITLE PAGE

DEDICATION

MAPS

CHAPTER I

: That Egyptian Woman

CHAPTER II

: Dead Men Don’t Bite

CHAPTER III

: Cleopatra Captures the Old Man by Magic

CHAPTER IV

: The Golden Age Never Was the Present Age

CHAPTER V

: Man Is by Nature a Political Creature

CHAPTER VI

: We Must Often Shift the Sails When We Wish to

Arrive in Port

CHAPTER VII

: An Object of Gossip for the Whole World

CHAPTER VIII

: Illicit Aﬀairs and Bastard Children

CHAPTER IX

: The Wickedest Woman in History

NOTES

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

ILLUSTRATION CREDITS

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Stacy Schiff Cleopatra A Life Biography — page 3

ABOUT THE BOOK

Cleopatra’s palace shimmered with onyx and gold but was

richer still in political and sexual intrigue. Though her life

spanned fewer than forty years, it reshaped the contours of

the ancient world.

Famous long before she was notorious, Cleopatra has gone

down in history for all the wrong reasons. Stacy Schiﬀ boldly

separates fact from ﬁction to rescue the magnetic queen

whose death ushered in a new world order a generation

before the birth of Christ. Rich in detail, epic in scope,

Schiﬀ’s biography is a luminous reconstruction of a dazzling

life.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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.

Stacy Schiff Cleopatra A Life Biography — page 5

ALSO BY STACY SCHIFF

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

America

Véra (Mrs Vladimir Nabokov)

Saint-Exupéry: A Biography

Cleopatra

A Life

Stacy Schiﬀ

Finally, for Max, Millie, and Jo

Stacy Schiff Cleopatra A Life Biography — page 8

Stacy Schiff Cleopatra A Life Biography — page 9

Stacy Schiff Cleopatra A Life Biography — page 10

THAT EGYPTIAN WOMAN

“Man’s most valuable trait is a judicious sense of what not to believe.”

—

EURIPIDES

AMONG THE MOST

famous women to have lived, Cleopatra VII

ruled Egypt for twenty-two years. She lost a kingdom once,

regained it, nearly lost it again, amassed an empire, lost it

all. A goddess as a child, a queen at eighteen, a celebrity

soon thereafter, she was an object of speculation and

veneration, gossip and legend, even in her own time. At the

height of her power she controlled virtually the entire

eastern Mediterranean coast, the last great kingdom of any

Egyptian ruler. For a ﬂeeting moment she held the fate of

the Western world in her hands. She had a child with a

married man, three more with another. She died at thirty-

nine, a generation before the birth of Christ. Catastrophe

reliably cements a reputation, and Cleopatra’s end was

sudden and sensational. She has lodged herself in our

imaginations ever since. Many people have spoken for her,

including the greatest playwrights and poets; we have been

putting words in her mouth for two thousand years. In one

of the busiest afterlives in history she has gone on to

become an asteroid, a video game, a cliché, a cigarette, a

slot machine, a strip club, a synonym for Elizabeth Taylor.

Shakespeare attested to Cleopatra’s inﬁnite variety. He had

no idea.

Stacy Schiff Cleopatra A Life Biography — page 11

If the name is indelible, the image is blurry. Cleopatra may

be one of the most recognizable ﬁgures in history but we

have little idea of what she actually looked like. Only her

coin portraits—issued in her lifetime, and which she likely

approved—can be accepted as authentic. We remember her

too for the wrong reasons. A capable, clear-eyed sovereign,

she knew how to build a ﬂeet, suppress an insurrection,

control a currency, alleviate a famine. An eminent Roman

general vouched for her grasp of military aﬀairs. Even at a

time when women rulers were no rarity she stood out, the

sole female of the ancient world to rule alone and to play a

role in Western aﬀairs. She was incomparably richer than

anyone else in the Mediterranean. And she enjoyed greater

prestige than any other woman of her age, as an excitable

rival king was reminded when he called, during her stay at

his court, for her assassination. (In light of her stature, it

could not be done.) Cleopatra descended from a long line of

murderers and faithfully upheld the family tradition but was,

for her time and place, remarkably well behaved. She

nonetheless survives as a wanton temptress, not the last

time a genuinely powerful woman has been transmuted into

a shamelessly seductive one.

Like all lives that lend themselves to poetry, Cleopatra’s

was one of dislocations and disappointments. She grew up

amid unsurpassed luxury, to inherit a kingdom in decline.

For ten generations her family had styled themselves

pharaohs. The Ptolemies were in fact Macedonian Greek,

which makes Cleopatra approximately as Egyptian as

Elizabeth Taylor. At eighteen Cleopatra and her ten-year-old

brother assumed control of a country with a weighty past

and a wobbly future. Thirteen hundred years separate

Cleopatra from Nefertiti. The pyramids—to which Cleopatra

almost certainly introduced Julius Caesar—already sported

graﬃti. The Sphinx had undergone a major restoration, a

thousand years earlier. And the glory of the once great

Ptolemaic Empire had dimmed. Cleopatra came of age in a

Stacy Schiff Cleopatra A Life Biography — page 12

world shadowed by Rome, which in the course of her

childhood extended its rule to Egypt’s borders. When

Cleopatra was eleven, Caesar reminded his oﬃcers that if

they did not make war, if they did not obtain riches and rule

others, they were not Romans. An Eastern sovereign who

waged an epic battle of his own against Rome articulated

what would become Cleopatra’s predicament diﬀerently:

The Romans had the temperament of wolves. They hated

the great kings. Everything they possessed they had

plundered. They intended to seize all, and would “either

destroy

everything

perish

the

attempt.”

The

implications for the last remaining wealthy country in

Rome’s

sphere

inﬂuence

were

clear.

Egypt

had

distinguished itself for its nimble negotiating; for the most

part, it retained its autonomy. It had also already embroiled

itself in Roman aﬀairs.

For a staggering sum of money, Cleopatra’s father had

secured the oﬃcial designation “friend and ally of the

Roman people.” His daughter would discover that it was not

suﬃcient to be a friend to that people and their Senate; it

was essential to befriend the most powerful Roman of the

day. That made for a bewildering assignment in the late

Republic, wracked by civil wars. They ﬂared up regularly

throughout Cleopatra’s lifetime, pitting a succession of

Roman commanders against one another in what was

essentially a hot-tempered contest of personal ambition,

twice

unexpectedly

decided

Egyptian

soil.

Each

convulsion

left

the

Mediterranean

world

shuddering,

scrambling to correct its loyalties and redirect its tributes.

Cleopatra’s father had thrown in his lot with Pompey the

Great, the brilliant Roman general on whom good fortune

seemed eternally to shine. He became the family patron. He

also entered into a civil war against Julius Caesar just as,

across the Mediterranean, Cleopatra ascended to the

throne. In the summer of 48 BC Caesar dealt Pompey a

crushing defeat in central Greece; Pompey ﬂed to Egypt, to

Stacy Schiff Cleopatra A Life Biography — page 13

be stabbed and decapitated on an Egyptian beach.

Cleopatra was twenty-one. She had no choice but to

ingratiate herself with the new master of the Roman world.

She did so diﬀerently from most other client kings, whose

names, not incidentally, are forgotten today. For the next

years she struggled to turn the implacable Roman tide to

her advantage, changing patrons again after Caesar’s

murder, ultimately to wind up with his protégé, Mark Antony.

From a distance her reign amounts to a reprieve. Her story

was essentially over before it began, although that is of

course not the way she would have seen it. With her death

Egypt became a Roman province. It would not recover its

autonomy until the twentieth century.

Can anything good be said of a woman who slept with the

two most powerful men of her time? Possibly, but not in an

age when Rome controlled the narrative. Cleopatra stood at

one of the most dangerous intersections in history: that of

women and power. Clever women, Euripides had warned

hundreds of years earlier, were dangerous. A Roman

historian was perfectly happy to write oﬀ a Judaean queen

as a mere ﬁgurehead and—six pages later—to condemn her

for her reckless ambition, her indecent embrace of authority.

A more disarming brand of power made itself felt as well. In

a ﬁrst-century BC marriage contract, a bride promised to be

faithful and aﬀectionate. She further vowed not to add love

potions to her husband’s food or drink. We do not know if

Cleopatra loved either Antony or Caesar, but we do know

that she got each to do her bidding. From the Roman point

of view she “enslaved” them both. Already it was a zero-

sum game: a woman’s authority spelled a man’s deception.

Asked how she had obtained her inﬂuence over Augustus,

the ﬁrst Roman emperor, his wife purportedly replied that

she had done so “by being scrupulously chaste herself,

doing gladly whatever pleased him, not meddling with any

of his aﬀairs, and, in particular, by pretending neither to

hear of nor to notice the favorites that were the objects of

Stacy Schiff Cleopatra A Life Biography — page 14

his passion.” There is no reason to accept that formula at

face value. On the other hand, Cleopatra was cut from very

diﬀerent cloth. In the course of a leisurely ﬁshing trip, under

a languid Alexandrian sun, she had no trouble suggesting

that the most celebrated Roman general of the day tend to

his responsibilities.

To a Roman, license and lawlessness were Greek

preserves. Cleopatra was twice suspect, once for hailing

from a culture known for its “natural talent for deception,”

again for her Alexandrian address. A Roman could not pry

apart the exotic and the erotic; Cleopatra was a stand-in for

the occult, alchemical East, for her sinuous, sensuous land,

as perverse and original as its astonishment of a river. Men

who came in contact with her seem to have lost their heads,

or at least to have rethought their agendas. She runs away

even with Plutarch’s biography of Mark Antony. She works

the same eﬀect on a nineteenth-century historian, who

describes her, on meeting Caesar, as “a loose girl of

sixteen.” (She was rather an intensely focused woman of

twenty-one.) The siren call of the East long predated

Cleopatra, but no matter; she hailed from the intoxicating

land of sex and excess. It is not diﬃcult to understand why

Caesar became history, Cleopatra a legend.

Our view is further obscured by the fact that the Romans

who told Cleopatra’s story very nearly knew their ancient

history too well. Repeatedly it seeps into their accounts. Like

Mark Twain in the overwhelming, overstuﬀed Vatican, we

sometimes prefer the copies to the original. So did the

classical authors. They conﬂated accounts, refurbishing old

tales. They saddled Cleopatra with the vices of other

miscreants. History existed to be retold, with more panache

but not necessarily greater accuracy. In the ancient texts

the villains always wear a particularly vulgar purple, eat too

much roasted peacock, douse themselves in rare unguents,

melt down pearls. Whether you were a transgressive, power-

hungry Egyptian queen or a ruthless pirate, you were known

Stacy Schiff Cleopatra A Life Biography — page 15

for the “odious extravagance” of your accessories. Iniquity

and opulence went hand in hand; your world blazed purple

and gold. Nor did it help that history bled into mythology,

the human into the divine. Cleopatra’s was a world in which

you could visit the relics of Orpheus’s lyre, or view the egg

from which Helen of Troy had hatched. (It was in Sparta.)

History is written not only by posterity, but for posterity as

well. Our most comprehensive sources never met Cleopatra.

Plutarch was born seventy-six years after she died. (He was

working at the same time as Matthew, Mark, Luke, and

John.) Appian wrote at a remove of more than a century; Dio

of well over two. Cleopatra’s story diﬀers from most

women’s stories in that the men who shaped it—for their

own reasons—enlarged rather than erased her role. Her

relationship with Mark Antony was the longest of her life,

but her relationship with his rival, Augustus, was the most

enduring. He would defeat Antony and Cleopatra. To Rome,

to enhance the glory, he delivered up the tabloid version of

an Egyptian queen, insatiable, treacherous, bloodthirsty,

power-crazed.

magniﬁed

Cleopatra

hyperbolic

proportions so as to do the same with his victory—and so as

to smuggle his real enemy, his former brother-in-law, out of

the picture. The end result is a nineteenth-century British

life of Napoleon or a twentieth-century history of America,

were it to have been written by Chairman Mao.

To the team of extraordinarily tendentious historians, add

an extraordinarily spotty record. No papyri from Alexandria

survive. Almost nothing of the ancient city survives

aboveground. We have, perhaps and at most, one written

word of Cleopatra’s. (In 33 BC either she or a scribe signed

oﬀ on a royal decree with the Greek word ginesthoi,

meaning, “Let it be done.”) Classical authors were

indiﬀerent to statistics and occasionally even to logic; their

accounts contradict one another and themselves. Appian is

careless with details, Josephus hopeless with chronology. Dio

preferred rhetoric to exactitude. The lacunae are so regular

Stacy Schiff Cleopatra A Life Biography — page 16

as to seem deliberate; there is very nearly a conspiracy of

silences. How is it possible that we do not have an

authoritative

bust

Cleopatra

from

age

accomplished, realistic portraiture? Cicero’s letters of the

ﬁrst months of 44 BC—when Caesar and Cleopatra were

together in Rome—were never published. The longest Greek

history of the era glosses over the tumultuous period at

hand. It is diﬃcult to say what we miss most. Appian

promises more of Caesar and Cleopatra in his four books of

Egyptian history, which do not survive. Livy’s account

breaks oﬀ a century before Cleopatra. We know the detailed

work of her personal physician only from Plutarch’s

references. Dellius’s chronicle has vanished, along with the

raunchy letters Cleopatra was said to have written him.

Even Lucan comes to an abrupt, infuriating halt partway

through

his

epic

poem,

leaving

Caesar

trapped

Cleopatra’s palace at the outset of the Alexandrian War. And

in the absence of facts, myth rushes in, the kudzu of history.

The holes in the record present one hazard, what we have

constructed around them another. Aﬀairs of state have

fallen away, leaving us with aﬀairs of the heart. A

commanding woman versed in politics, diplomacy, and

governance; ﬂuent in nine languages; silver-tongued and

charismatic, Cleopatra nonetheless seems the joint creation

of Roman propagandists and Hollywood directors. She is left

to put a vintage label on something we have always known

existed: potent female sexuality. And her timing was lousy.

Not only was her history written by her enemies, but it was

her misfortune to have been on everyone’s minds just as

Latin poetry came into its own. She survives literarily in a

language hostile to her. The ﬁctions have only proliferated.

George Bernard Shaw lists among his sources for Caesar

and Cleopatra his own imagination. Plenty of historians have

deferred to Shakespeare, which is understandable but a

little like taking George C. Scott’s word for Patton’s.

Stacy Schiff Cleopatra A Life Biography — page 17

To restore Cleopatra is as much to salvage the few facts as

peel

away

the

encrusted

myth

and

the

hoary

propaganda. She was a Greek woman whose history fell to

men whose futures lay with Rome, the majority of them

oﬃcials of the empire. Their historical methods are opaque

to us. They seldom named their sources. They relied to a

great extent on memory. They are by modern standards

polemicists, apologists, moralists, fabulists, recyclers, cut-

and-pasters, hacks. For all its erudition, Cleopatra’s Egypt

produced no ﬁne historian. One can only read accordingly.

The sources may be ﬂawed, but they are the only sources

we have. There is no universal agreement on most of the

basic details of her life, no consensus on who her mother

was, how long Cleopatra lived in Rome, how often she was

pregnant, whether she and Antony married, what transpired

at the battle that sealed her fate, how she died. I have tried

here to bear in mind who was a former librarian and who a

Page Sixer, who had actually set eyes on Egypt, who

despised the place and who was born there, who had a

problem with women, who wrote with the zeal of a Roman

convert, who meant to settle a score, please his emperor,

perfect his hexameter. (I have relied little on Lucan. He was

early on the scene, before Plutarch, Appian, or Dio. He was

also a poet, and a sensationalist.) Even when they are

neither tendentious nor tangled, the accounts are often

overblown. As has been noted, there were no plain,

unvarnished stories in antiquity. The point was to dazzle. I

have not attempted to ﬁll in the blanks, though on occasion

I have corralled the possibilities. What looks merely

probable remains here merely probable—though opinions

diﬀer radically even on the probabilities. The irreconcilable

remains unreconciled. Mostly I have restored context.

Indeed

Cleopatra

murdered

her

siblings,

but

Herod

murdered his children. (He afterward wailed that he was

“the most unfortunate of fathers.”) And as Plutarch reminds

us, such behavior was axiomatic among sovereigns.

Stacy Schiff Cleopatra A Life Biography — page 18

Cleopatra was not necessarily beautiful, but her wealth—

and her palace—left a Roman gasping. All read very

diﬀerently on one side of the Mediterranean from the other.

The last decades of research on women in antiquity and on

Hellenistic Egypt substantially illuminate the picture. I have

tried to pluck the gauze of melodrama from the ﬁnal scenes

of the life, which reduce even sober chroniclers to soap

opera. Sometimes high drama prevails for a reason,

however. Cleopatra’s was an era of outsize, intriguing

personalities. At its end the greatest actors of the age exit

abruptly. A world comes crashing down after them.

While there is a great deal we do not know about Cleopatra,

there is a great deal she did not know either. She knew

neither that she was living in the ﬁrst century BC nor in the

Hellenistic Age, both of them later constructs. (The

Hellenistic Age begins with the death of Alexander the Great

in 323 BC and ends in 30 BC, with the death of Cleopatra. It

has been perhaps best deﬁned as a Greek era in which the

Greeks played no role.) She did not know she was Cleopatra

VII for several reasons, one of which is that she was actually

the sixth Cleopatra. She never knew anyone named

Octavian. The man who vanquished and deposed her,

prompted her suicide, and largely packaged her for

posterity was born Gaius Octavius. By the time he entered

Cleopatra’s life in a meaningful way he called himself Gaius

Julius Caesar, after his illustrious great-uncle, her lover, who

adopted him in his will. We know him today as Augustus, a

title he assumed only three years after Cleopatra’s death.

He appears here as Octavian, two Caesars remaining, as

ever, one too many.

Most place names have changed since antiquity. I have

followed Lionel Casson’s sensible lead in opting for

familiarity over consistency. Hence Berytus is here Beirut,

while Pelusium—which no longer exists, but would today be

just east of Port Said, at the entrance to the Suez Canal—

Stacy Schiff Cleopatra A Life Biography — page 19

remains Pelusium. Similarly I have opted for English

spellings over transliterations. Caesar’s rival appears as

Pompey rather than Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus, Caesar’s

deputy as Mark Antony rather than Marcus Antonius. In

many respects geography has changed, shorelines have

sunk, marshes dried, hills crumbled. Alexandria is ﬂatter

today than it was in Cleopatra’s lifetime. It is oblivious to its

ancient street plan; it no longer gleams white. The Nile is

nearly two miles farther east. The dust, the sultry sea air,

Alexandria’s melting purple sunsets, are unchanged. Human

nature remains remarkably consistent, the physics of history

immutable. Firsthand accounts continue to diverge wildly.

For well over two thousand years, a myth has been able to

outrun and outlive a fact. Except where noted, all dates are

BC.

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.

DEAD MEN DON’T BITE

“It’s a godsend, really lucky, when one has so few relations.”

—

MENANDER

THAT SUMMER SHE

rallied a band of mercenaries, at a desert

camp, under the glassy heat of the Syrian sun. She was

twenty-one, an orphan and an exile. Already she had known

both excessive good fortune and its ﬂamboyant consort,

calamity. Accustomed to the greatest luxury of the day, she

held court two hundred miles from the ebony doors and

onyx ﬂoors of home. Her tent amid the scrub of the desert

was the closest she had come in a year. Over those months

she had scrambled for her life, ﬂeeing through Middle Egypt,

Palestine, and southern Syria. She had spent a dusty

summer raising an army.

The women in her family were good at this and so clearly

was she, accomplished enough anyway for the enemy to

have marched out to meet her. Dangerously close at hand,

not far from the seaside fortress of Pelusium, on the eastern

frontier of Egypt, were 20,000 veteran soldiers, an army

about half the size of that with which Alexander the Great

had crossed into Asia three centuries earlier. This one was a

formidable assembly of pirates and bandits, outlaws, exiles,

and fugitive slaves, under the titular command of her

thirteen-year-old brother. With him she had inherited the

throne of Egypt. She had shunted him aside; in return he

had banished her from the kingdom over which they were

Stacy Schiff Cleopatra A Life Biography — page 21

meant to rule jointly, as husband and wife. Her brother’s

army controlled Pelusium’s redbrick walls, its massive

twenty-foot, semicircular towers. She camped farther east,

along the desolate coast, in a smoldering sea of amber

sand. A battle loomed. Her position was hopeless at best.

For the last time in two thousand years Cleopatra VII stands

oﬀstage. In a matter of days she will launch herself into

history, which is to say that faced with the inevitable, she

will counter with the improbable. It is 48 BC.

Throughout the Mediterranean a “strange madness” hung

in the air, ripe with omens and portents and extravagant

rumors. The mood was one of nervous exasperation. It was

possible to be anxious and elated, empowered and afraid,

all in the course of a single afternoon. Some rumors even

proved true. Early in July Cleopatra heard that the Roman

civil war—a contest that pitted the invincible Julius Caesar

against the indomitable Pompey the Great—was about to

collide with her own. This was alarming news. For as long as

Cleopatra could remember, the Romans had served as

protectors of the Egyptian monarchs. They owed their

throne to that disruptive power, which in a few generations

had conquered most of the Mediterranean world. Also as

long as she could remember, Pompey had been a particular

friend of her father’s. A brilliant general, Pompey had for

decades piled up victories, on land and sea, subduing nation

after nation, in Africa, Asia, and Europe. Both Cleopatra and

her estranged brother, Ptolemy XIII, were in his debt.

Days later Cleopatra discovered that the chances of being

murdered by someone who owed you a favor were every bit

as good as the chances of being murdered by a member of

your immediate family. On September 28, Pompey appeared

oﬀ the coast of Pelusium. He had been routed by Caesar.

Desperate, he cast about for a refuge. He thought logically

enough of the young king whose family he had supported

and who was deeply beholden to him. No request he might

make could in good faith be denied. The three regents who

Stacy Schiff Cleopatra A Life Biography — page 22

essentially ruled for young Ptolemy—Theodotus, his rhetoric

master; Achillas, the bold commander of the royal guard;

and Pothinus, the eunuch who had nimbly parlayed his role

as childhood tutor into that of prime minister—disagreed.

The unexpected arrival presented them with a diﬃcult

decision, which they hotly debated. Opinions diﬀered. To

cast oﬀ Pompey was to make an enemy of him. To receive

him was to make an enemy of Caesar. Were they to

eliminate Pompey, he could oﬀer no assistance to Cleopatra,

to whom he was well disposed. Nor could he install himself

on the throne of Egypt. “Dead men don’t bite” was the

irrefutable counsel of Theodotus, the rhetoric teacher, who

—having proved by simple syllogism that they could aﬀord

neither to befriend nor oﬀend Pompey—delivered the line

with a smile. He dispatched a welcoming message and a

“wretched little boat” for the Roman. Pompey had not yet

set foot on shore when, in the shallow waters oﬀ Pelusium,

in full view of Ptolemy’s army and of the miniature king in

his purple robes, he was stabbed to death, his head severed

from his body.

Caesar would try later to make sense of that savagery.

Friends often turn into enemies in time of disaster, he

conceded. He might equally well have noted that at times of

disaster enemies reinvent themselves as friends. Ptolemy’s

advisers beheaded Pompey most of all to curry favor with

Caesar. What better way to endear themselves to the

undisputed master of the Mediterranean world? By the same

logic the three had simpliﬁed matters for Cleopatra. In the

Roman civil war—a contest of such searing intensity that it

seemed less an armed conﬂict than a plague, a ﬂood, a ﬁre

—she now appeared to have backed the losing side.

Three days later Julius Caesar ventured ashore in the

Egyptian capital, in pursuit of his rival. He arrived in

advance of the bulk of his troops. A great metropolis,

Alexandria was home to malicious wit, dubious morals,

grand larceny. Its residents talked fast, in many languages

Stacy Schiff Cleopatra A Life Biography — page 23

and at once; theirs was an excitable city of short tempers

and taut, vibrating minds. Already it was in ferment, unrest

this second ﬂash of imperial red exacerbated. Caesar had

been careful to modulate his joy in his victory and continued

to do so. When Theodotus presented him with Pompey’s

three-day-old severed head, Caesar turned away in horror.

He then burst into tears. A few may even have been

genuine; at one time Pompey had been not only his ally but

his son-in-law. If Ptolemy’s advisers felt the gruesome

welcome would hold Caesar oﬀ, they were wrong. If Caesar

thought that Pompey’s murder constituted a vote in his

favor, he too was mistaken, at least so far as the

Alexandrians were concerned. Riots greeted him onshore,

where no one was less welcome than a Roman, especially

one bearing the oﬃcial trappings of power. At best Caesar

would interfere with their aﬀairs. At worst he had conquest

in mind. Already Rome had restored an unpopular king who

—to make matters worse—taxed his people to pay oﬀ the

debt for that restoration. The Alexandrians did not care to

pay the price for a king they had not wanted in the ﬁrst

place. Nor did they care to become Roman subjects.

Caesar installed himself securely in a pavilion on the

grounds of the Ptolemies’ palace, adjoining the royal

dockyards, in the eastern part of the city. The skirmishing

continued—roars and scuﬄes echoed loudly down the

colonnaded streets—but in the palace he was safe from all

disturbance. He sent hastily for reinforcements. And having

done so, he summoned the feuding siblings. Caesar felt it

incumbent upon him to arbitrate their dispute, as a decade

earlier he and Pompey had together lobbied for their father.

A stable Egypt was in Rome’s best interest, the more so

when there were substantial debts to be paid. As Caesar

had himself recently suggested to his rival, it was time for

the warring parties “to put an end to their obstinate

behavior, abandon armed struggle, and not risk their luck

Stacy Schiff Cleopatra A Life Biography — page 24

any further.” Cleopatra and her brother should have mercy

on themselves and on their country.

The summons left Cleopatra with some explaining to do,

as well as some calculating. She had every reason to plead

her case promptly, before her brother’s advisers could

undermine her. His army eﬀectively blocked her from Egypt.

Although Caesar had requested he disband it, Ptolemy

made no eﬀort to do so. To move her own men west,

through the golden sand, toward the border and the high

towers at Pelusium, was to risk an engagement. By one

account she made contact with Caesar through an

intermediary, then, convinced she had been betrayed (she

was unpopular with the palace courtiers), she determined to

plead her case herself. Which left her to puzzle out how to

slip past enemy lines, across a well-patrolled frontier, and

into a blockaded palace, covertly and alive. Cleopatra’s

reputation would come to rest on her gift for pageantry, but

in her ﬁrst and greatest political gamble the challenge was

to make herself inconspicuous. By modern standards too

hers was a curious predicament. To make her mark, for her

story to begin, this woman had to smuggle herself back into

the house.

Clearly there was some deliberation. Plutarch tells us that

“she was at a loss how to get in undiscovered” until she—or

someone in her entourage; she, too, had conﬁdants—hit on

a brilliant ruse. It would have required a dress rehearsal.

And it called for several exceedingly skilled accomplices,

one of whom was a loyal Sicilian retainer named

Apollodorus. Between the Sinai peninsula, where Cleopatra

was camped, and the palace of Alexandria, where she had

grown up, lay a treacherous marshland, thick with mites and

mosquitoes. That swampy ﬂat protected Egypt from eastern

invasions. It took its name from its ability to devour whole

armies, which the heavy sands did with “malevolent

cunning.” Ptolemy’s forces controlled the coast, where

Pompey’s body rotted in a makeshift grave. The surest and

Stacy Schiff Cleopatra A Life Biography — page 25

simplest route west was then neither through the muddy

pools of Pelusium nor along the Mediterranean, where

Cleopatra would have been exposed to view and to a strong

opposing current. It made more sense to detour south, up

the Nile to Memphis, afterward to sail back to the coast, a

trip of at least eight days. The river route was not without its

dangers either; it was heavily traﬃcked and carefully

surveyed by customs agents. Along the turbid Nile

Cleopatra presumably sailed, with a strong wind and a host

mosquitoes,

mid-October.

Ptolemy’s

advisers

meanwhile balked at Caesar’s request. How dare a Roman

general summon a king? The lower-ranking party should call

on the higher, as Caesar well knew.

So it was that Apollodorus silently maneuvered a tiny two-

oared boat into Alexandria’s eastern harbor and under the

palace wall just after dusk. Close to shore all was dark, while

from a distance the city’s low-lying coast was illuminated by

its magniﬁcent, four-hundred-foot-tall lighthouse, a wonder

of the ancient world. That blazing pillar stood a half mile

from Cleopatra, at the end of a man-made causeway, on the

island of Pharos. Even in its glow she was nowhere to be

seen, however. At some point before Apollodorus docked his

boat, she crawled into an oversize sack of hemp or leather,

in which she arranged herself lengthwise. Apollodorus rolled

up the bundle and secured it with a leather cord, slinging it

over his shoulder, the only clue we have as to Cleopatra’s

size. To the gentle lap of the waves he set out across the

palace grounds, a complex of gardens and multicolored

villas and colonnaded walkways that spread over nearly a

mile, or a quarter of the city. It was an area that Apollodorus

—who certainly had not rowed from the desert alone but

may have masterminded his queen’s return—knew well. On

his shoulder, Cleopatra rode through the palace gates and

directly into Caesar’s quarters, rooms that properly

belonged to her. It was one of the more unusual

homecomings in history. Many queens have risen from

Stacy Schiff Cleopatra A Life Biography — page 26

obscurity, but Cleopatra is the only one to have emerged on

the world stage from inside a sturdy sack, the kind of bag

into which one customarily stuﬀed rolls of papyrus or

transported a small fortune in gold. Ruses and disguises

came readily to her. On a later occasion she would conspire

with another woman in peril to make her escape in a coﬃn.

We do not know if the unveiling took place before Caesar.

Either way it is unlikely that Cleopatra appeared “majestic”

(as one source has it) or laden with gems and gold (as

another purports) or even marginally well coiﬀed. In

deﬁance of the male imagination, ﬁve centuries of art

history, and two of the greatest plays in English literature,

she would have been fully clothed, in a formﬁtting,

sleeveless, long linen tunic. The only accessory she needed

was one she alone among Egyptian women was entitled to

wear: the diadem, or broad white ribbon, that denoted a

Hellenistic ruler. It is unlikely she appeared before Julius

Caesar without one tied around her forehead and knotted at

the back. Of Cleopatra’s “knowledge of how to make herself

agreeable to everyone,” we have, on the other hand,

abundant evidence. Generally it was known to be impossible

to converse with her without being instantly captivated by

her. For this audience, the boldness of the maneuver—the

surprise appearance of the young queen in the sumptuously

painted halls of her own home, which Caesar himself could

barely

penetrate—proved

itself

enchantment.

Retrospectively, the shock appears to have been as much

political as personal. The jolt was that generated when, in a

singular, shuddering moment, two civilizations, passing in

diﬀerent directions, unexpectedly and momentously touch.

Celebrated as much for his speed as for his intuition, Julius

Caesar was not an easy man to surprise. He was forever

arriving before expected and in advance of the messengers

sent to announce him. (He was that fall paying the price for

having preceded his legions to Egypt.) If the greatest part of

his success could be explained “by his rapidity and by the

Stacy Schiff Cleopatra A Life Biography — page 27

unexpectedness of his movements,” he was for the rest

rarely disconcerted, armed for all contingencies, a precise

and lucid strategist. His impatience survives him: What is

Veni, vidi, vici—the claim was still a year in the future—if not

a paean to eﬃciency? So ﬁrm was his grasp of human

nature that he had at their decisive battle that summer

instructed his men not to hurl their javelins but to thrust

them into the faces of Pompey’s men. Their vanity, he

promised, would prove greater than their courage. He was

correct: the Pompeians had covered their faces and run.

Over the previous decade Caesar had overcome the most

improbable obstacles and performed the most astonishing

feats. Never one to oﬀend fortune, he felt all the same that

it could stand to be nudged along; he was the kind of

opportunist who makes a great show of marveling at his

sheer good luck. At least in terms of ingenuity and bold

decision-making, he had before him a kindred spirit.

In another realm the young Egyptian queen had little in

common with the “love-sated man already past his prime.”

(Caesar was ﬁfty-two.) His amorous conquests were as

legendary and as varied as his military feats. On the street

the elegant, angular-faced man with the ﬂashing black eyes

and the prominent cheekbones was hailed—there was

overstatement only on the second count—as “every

woman’s man and every man’s woman.” Cleopatra had

been married for three years to a brother who was by all

accounts “a mere boy” and who—even if he had by thirteen

attained puberty, which by ancient standards was unlikely—

had been trying for most of that time to dispose of her. Later

commentators would write oﬀ Cleopatra as “Ptolemy’s

impure daughter,” a “matchless siren,” the “painted whore”

whose “unchastity cost Rome dear.” What that “harlot

queen” was unlikely to have had when she materialized

before Caesar in October 48 was any sexual experience

whatever.

Stacy Schiff Cleopatra A Life Biography — page 28

Insofar as the two can be pried apart, survival rather than

seduction was ﬁrst on her mind. As her brother’s advisers

had amply demonstrated, the prize was Caesar’s favor. It

was imperative that Cleopatra align herelf with him instead

of with the family benefactor, whose campaign she had

supported and whose headless body lay decomposing on a

Mediterranean beach. Under the circumstances, there was

no reason to assume Caesar favorably disposed toward her.

From his point of view, a young king with an army at his

command and the conﬁdence of the Alexandrians was the

better bet. Ptolemy had the blood of Pompey on his hands,

however; Caesar may have calculated that the price to pay

in Rome for allying himself with his countryman’s murderers

would be greater than the price to pay for assisting a

deposed and helpless queen. He had long before grasped

that “all men work more zealously against their enemies

than they cooperate with their friends.” At least initially,

Cleopatra may have owed her life more to Caesar’s censure

of her brother and his distaste for Ptolemy’s advisers—they

hardly seemed the kind of men with whom one settled frank

ﬁnancial matters—than to any charms of her own. She was

also lucky. As one chronicler pointed out, a diﬀerent man

might have traded her life for Pompey’s. Caesar could

equally well have lopped oﬀ her head.

Generally

the

Roman

commander

was

mild

disposition. He was perfectly capable of killing tens of

thousands of men, equally famous for his displays of

clemency, even toward bitter enemies, sometimes toward

the same ones twice. “Nothing was dearer to his heart,” one

of his generals asserts, “than pardoning suppliants.” A

plucky, royal, well-spoken suppliant doubtless topped that

list. Caesar had further reason to take to this one: As a

young man, he too had been a fugitive. He too had made

costly political mistakes. While the decision to welcome

Cleopatra may have been logical at the time, it led to one of

the closest calls of Caesar’s career. When he met Cleopatra

Stacy Schiff Cleopatra A Life Biography — page 29

she was struggling for her life. By late fall they both were.

For the next months Caesar found himself under siege,

pummeled by an ingenious enemy keen to oﬀer him his ﬁrst

taste of guerrilla warfare, in a city with which he was

unfamiliar and in which he was vastly outnumbered. Surely

Ptolemy and the people of Alexandria deserve some credit

for seeing to it that—closeted together for six nerve-

wracking months behind hastily constructed barricades—the

balding veteran general and the agile young queen

emerged as close allies, so close that by early November,

Cleopatra realized she was pregnant.

Behind every great fortune, it has been noted, is a crime;

the Ptolemies were fabulously rich. They were descended

not from the Egyptian pharaohs whose place they assumed

but from the scrappy, hard-living Macedonians (tough

terrain breeds tough men, Herodotus had already warned)

who produced Alexander the Great. Within months of

Alexander’s death, Ptolemy—the most enterprising of his

generals, his oﬃcial taster, a childhood intimate, and by

some accounts a distant relative—had laid claim to Egypt. In

an early display of the family gift for stagecraft, Ptolemy

kidnapped Alexander the Great’s body. It had been headed

for Macedonia. Would it not be far more useful, reasoned

young Ptolemy, intercepting the funeral cortege, in Egypt,

ultimately in Alexandria, a city the great man had founded

only decades earlier? There it was rerouted, to be displayed

in a gold sarcophagus at the center of the city, a relic, a

talisman, a recruiting aid, an insurance policy. (By

Cleopatra’s childhood, the sarcophagus was alabaster or

glass. Strapped for funds, her great-uncle had traded the

original for an army. He paid for the substitution with his

life.)

The legitimacy of the Ptolemaic dynasty would rest on this

tenuous connection to the most storied ﬁgure in the ancient

world, the one against whom all aspirants measured

Stacy Schiff Cleopatra A Life Biography — page 30

themselves, in whose mantle Pompey had wrapped himself,

whose feats were said to reduce Caesar to tears of

inadequacy. The cult was universal. Alexander played as

active a role in the Ptolemaic imagination as in the Roman

one. Many Egyptian homes displayed statues of him. So

strong was his romance—and so fungible was ﬁrst-century

history—that it would come to include a version in which

Alexander descended from an Egyptian wizard. Soon

enough he was said to have been related to the royal

family; like all self-respecting arrivistes, the Ptolemies had a

gift for reconﬁguring history. Without renouncing their

Macedonian heritage, the dynasty’s founders bought

themselves a legitimacy-conferring past, the ancient-world

equivalent of the mail-order coat of arms. What was true

was

that

Ptolemy

descended

from

the

Macedonian

aristocracy, a synonym for high drama. As a consequence,

no one in Egypt considered Cleopatra to be Egyptian. She

hailed instead from a line of rancorous, meddlesome,

shrewd, occasionally unhinged Macedonian queens, a line

that included the fourth-century Olympias, whose greatest

contribution to the world was her son, Alexander the Great.

The rest were atrocities.

If outside Egypt the Ptolemies held to the Alexander the

Great narrative, within the country their legitimacy derived

from a fabricated link with the pharaohs. This justiﬁed the

practice of sibling marriage, understood to be an Egyptian

custom. Amid the Macedonian aristocracy there was ample

precedent for murdering your sibling, none for marrying her.

Nor was there a Greek word for “incest.” The Ptolemies

carried the practice to an extreme. Of the ﬁfteen or so

family marriages, at least ten were full brother-sister unions.

Two other Ptolemies married nieces or cousins. They may

have done so for simplicity’s sake; intermarriage minimized

both claimants to the throne and pesky in-laws. It eliminated

the problem of ﬁnding an appropriate spouse in a foreign

land. It also neatly reinforced the family cult, along with the

Stacy Schiff Cleopatra A Life Biography

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