Steven Saylor: The judgement of Caesar

Long after her lifetime, Cleopatra continued and continues to attract acolytes, admirers, enemies, and victims, especially among dramatists and other writers. In Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare famously presented the Roman general and the queen as star-crossed lovers. Using the Bard's text (as adapted by Franco Zeffirelli), Samuel Barber composed an opera to inaugurate the Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center in 1966; for his efforts on behalf of the queen, the composer of the immortal Adagio for Strings received a devastating critical reception. George Bernard Shaw gave us his Caesar and Cleopatra, with a kittenish queen later embodied on screen by Vivien Leigh. In the 1960s, Elizabeth Taylor eclipsed all previous (and subsequent) portrayals in the much-maligned film written and directed by Joseph Mankiewicz, whose involvement with the perilous queen caused him even more suffering than that endured by Samuel Barber. No matter how irresistible her allure, one is wise to approach Cleopatra with caution.

Was Cleopatra beautiful? The historian Dio is unequivocal; this is the translation by Herbert Baldwin Foster: She was a woman of surpassing beauty, especially conspicuous at that time because in the prime of youth, with a most delicious voice and a knowledge of how to make herself agreeable to everyone. Being brilliant to look upon and to listen to, with a power to subjugate even a cold-natured or elderly person, she thought that she might prove exactly to Caesar's tastes and reposed in her beauty all her claims to advancement.

Plutarch, in his Life of Antony, equivocates only slightly; this is the Dryden translation: Her beauty in itself was not so remarkable that none could be compared with her, or that no one could see her without being struck by it, but the contact of her presence was irresistible; the attraction of her person, joining with the charm of her conversation, and the character that attended all she said or did, was something bewitching.

Unfortunately, we have few images of Cleopatra by which to judge her beauty with our own eyes. Crude coin portraits offer something close to caricature, and the only bust of Cleopatra accepted as genuine, that in the Vatican, is missing its nose. Andre Malraux said, "Nefertiti is a face without a queen; Cleopatra is a queen without a face."

When I came to study Cleopatra in earnest, my childhood images of her, inspired by the glamorous Elizabeth Taylor portrayal, eventually faded, and I found myself confronted by a profoundly problematic personality. By twenty-first-century supermodel standards, Cleopatra may or may not have been beautiful; but her psyche, by modern standards, was decidedly not pretty. Having been raised to become an absolute ruler, in ruthless competition with her siblings for the affections of their father, the patriarch of an incestuous clan, Cleopatra, one may safely say, came from a dysfunctional family. Just as her father murdered his rebellious eldest daughter, Berenice, so Cleopatra, having eliminated with Caesar's help her brother-husband, Ptolemy, would eventually murder her other siblings, Arsinoe and the younger Ptolemy. We can only wonder at the distorted psychology that created and was created by such violence. There is the added complication that Cleopatra may quite seriously have considered herself to be at least semidivine. If she were to appear among the glitterati of today, I think we might conservatively classify her as mad, bad, and dangerous to know.

Indeed, the more I study all the dominant individuals of this period-including Pompey and Caesar-the more I am reminded of a comment by the writer L. Sprague de Camp, who, in a different context (reviewing the fantasy novels of E. R. Eddison), wrote: In short, Eddison's "great men," even the best of them, are cruel, arrogant bullies. One may admire, in the abstract, the indomitable courage, energy, and ability of such rampant egotists. In the concrete, however, they are like the larger carnivora, best admired with a set of stout bars between them and the viewer.

We have only a vague idea of what Cleopatra looked like; we have no image whatsoever of her brother King Ptolemy. We are not even certain of his age at the time of Caesar's arrival; I have made him fifteen, the oldest age postulated by historians. When writers or filmmakers have bothered to deal with Ptolemy at all, the portrait is not flattering; Mankiewicz cast the boy-king as a petulant brat dominated by the eunuch Pothinus, whom he cast as a simpering queen. But why should we assume that Ptolemy was any less beautiful or charismatic than his elder sister, or that the spell he cast upon Caesar was any less profound? As one of history's losers, Cleopatra was vilified and marginalized by those who triumphed over her. We may assume that the same was done to Ptolemy. Between the lines of Caesar's The Civil War is the story of a curious triangular relationship that must have developed between the Roman conqueror and the sibling-spouses amid the hothouse intrigues of their confinement in the palace compound at Alexandria. In this novel, Ptolemy's parting words of love and devotion to Caesar are lifted word for word from Caesar's own account. What did the siblings feel for each other, what did they feel for Caesar, and what did Caesar feel for them in return? It seems to me that historians, blinded by their fascination with Cleopatra (and by the mores of their own times), have ignored the untold story of the decisions, political and personal, that faced Caesar in his struggle to settle affairs of state-and affairs of the heart-in Egypt.

For the tale of Pompey's demise and Caesar's doings in Alexandria, our sources are rich, though not always in agreement. Dio and Appian in their histories of Rome, Plutarch in his lives of Caesar and Pompey, Suetonius in his life of Caesar, Lucan in his epic poem Pharsalia, and Caesar in his memoir of the Civil War all recount various aspects of the tale. Pliny gives us exact measurements regarding the inundation of the Nile; this is the translation of H. Rackham: "The largest rise up to date was one of 27 feet… and the smallest 71/2 feet in the year of the war of Pharsalus, as if the river were trying to avert the murder of Pompey by a sort of portent."

From Strabo, writing in 25 B.C., we learn what little we know of the layout of ancient Alexandria, which remains unexcavated by modern archaeologists; the exact location of the Library and numerous other landmarks is unknown. The Adventures of Leucippe and Cleitophon by Achilles Tatius, who wrote in the second century a.d., provides a small clue about the uncertain location of the Tomb of Alexander. Lucan tells us that Caesar visited Alexander's remains. (So did several later Roman emperors; Dio tells us Augustus, wishing to adorn the mummy with a gold crown, inadvertently broke off its nose.)

Among modern historians, I found these books to be of particular interest: Jack Lindsay's Cleopatra (Constable amp; Company Ltd., London, 1971), Arthur Weigall's The Life and Times of Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt

(G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York amp; London, 1924), Hans Volkmann's Cleopatra, A Study in Politics and Propaganda (Sagamore Press, New York 1958), Jean-Yves Empereur's Alexandria, Jewel of Egypt (Abrams, New York, 2002), and volume III of T. Rice Holmes's monumental The Roman Republic and the Founder of the Empire (The Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1923). I derived great pleasure from Jane Wilson Joyce's translation of Lucan's Pharsalia (Cornell University Press, Ithaca amp; London, 1993). Cleopatra of Egypt, from History to Myth (The British Museum Press, London, 2001), an exhibition catalogue edited by Susan Walker and Peter Higgs, contains a great wealth of images.

My thanks to Penni Kimmel, Rick Solomon, and Rick Lovin for reading the manuscript; to my tireless agent, Alan Nevins; and to my editor at St. Martin's Press, Keith Kahla.