Cleopatra the Great

by Joann Fletcher

  Certainly her surviving portrait busts seem to support her legendary beauty, despite doubts that they may represent Cleopatra because they are not inscribed — but then there are only three known statues of Ptolemaic royal women which do bear an identifying inscription. Even the famous bust of a royal woman in a tall blue crown from Amarna has no convenient name tag, yet no one has so far suggested that this is not Nefertiti. And given their characteristic features and iconography, it is usually possible to identify images of the Ptolemies, including the seventh Cleopatra herself.

  Yet even if it is accepted that she was beautiful, perceptions of what constitutes beauty have varied tremendously throughout history — from Rubenesque to Twiggy-thin, from noses long and aquiline to small and retrousse, the ancient ideal of beauty seems far from the artificially enhanced glamour of modern times. Certainly one high-class courtesan portrayed on an ancient Greek vase, looking at her face in a mirror with the tag line ‘she is beautiful’, seems rather wide of the mark to modern eyes, as does the image of the legendary courtesan Phryne who was renowned down the centuries as an all-time beauty. She was the model for Praxiteles’ famous sculpture of Aphrodite, regarded as breathtaking by all who saw it, but the statue has at best a mediocre face, which is far outshone by the aesthetic qualities of Kleopatra’s sculpted features, at least from this twenty-first-century Western female’s perspective.

  Clearly, in the eye of the beholder, images of Cleopatra have been subjected to an incredibly wide range of descriptions. One female writer has claimed she was ‘pretty neither by the standards of [her] own day nor by those of ours’, while discussing one of Cleopatra’s marble heads another female historian believes that ‘whilst it does not flatter her it bears a close relationship to the portraits of Alexander the Great’. Then again, male commentators claim the same head ‘suggests her great physical beauty’ and ‘is infinitely more beautiful than the unflattering coin portrait, and it does convey an image of the great queen’s personality’. As for these coin portraits, which have led some experts to declare that ‘even the famously attractive Cleopatra VII of Egypt is shown with a flabby neck that suggests a goitre’, they have variously been described as portraying someone who looks like a man ‘in drag’ and ‘a cruel, hook-nosed hag’ whereas to others the face is both ‘attractive’ and ‘radiant’.

  Regardless of such widely differing opinions of her physical beauty, the ancient sources agree that Cleopatra’s character exerted a force all of its own. It was said that ‘contact of her presence, if you lived with her, 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’. She was also blessed with ‘a most delicious voice’, in contrast to the high pitch of most female voices which apparently deviated so far from the masculine ‘norm’ they made men feel uncomfortable. Nor was the Greek belief that ‘silence is the ornament of women’ likely to have been a view held by Cleopatra.

  Able to converse easily on all matters of culture and politics, enhanced by travel to places in Greece, Italy and Syria that were also familiar to Caesar, ‘she had the facility of atuning her tongue, like an instrument with many strings, to whatever language she wished. There were few foreigners she had to deal with through an interpreter, and to most she herself gave her replies without an intermediary — to the Ethiopians, Troglodytes, Hebrews, Arabs, Syrians, Medes and Parthians. It is said she knew languages of many other peoples too, although the preceding kings had not tried to master even the Egyptian tongue, and some had indeed ceased to speak Macedonian.’ Although there are no references to her speaking Latin, it seems hardly credible that she would not have been able to understand the language of those with whom she had to deal throughout her life, for not all Romans could speak Greek. Yet Caesar, trained in Greek and Latin rhetoric, is known to have conversed in Greek, the medium of scholars.

  A modern psychiatric profile has claimed that Cleopatra had a borderline psychological disorder and a ‘narcissistic personality seems consistently to be the best description for her’; but she had been raised as a goddess from birth, and such traits are hardly surprising in a descendant of Alexander and three centuries of monarchs who believed themselves divine and were worshipped by their people. Yet the supreme self-confidence that such belief gave Cleopatra was clearly most attractive: Caesar must have greatly admired her youthful vitality and fearless nature, graphically demonstrated by the means she used to reach him and perhaps inspired by his own well-publicised methods of crossing enemy lines. For only a year earlier he had run the blockade of Pompeius’ fleet in the Adriatic, having ‘muffled his head with a cloak and secretly put to sea in a small boat, alone and incognito’, as she had just done.

  Despite the age gap, the twenty-two-year-old Greek pharaoh was not so different from the fifty-two-year-old Roman general, who may well have been something of a father figure. His sculpted images certainly show a man not dissimilar in appearance to Auletes, and for all their differences the two men shared some distinct characteristics. Both were flamboyant, both were pragmatic, and when necessary both were completely ruthless.

  Born in 100 BC, Gaius Julius Caesar — pronounced in the same way as the German ‘Kaiser’, which, like the Russian term ‘Tsar’, is a derivative — was named after his father, a government official. The family were descended from an exclusive group of aristocrats who used dynastic marriage to increase their wealth and social status. Educated by a tutor who had himself studied Greek and Latin rhetoric in Alexandria, the young Caesar became a keen poet and writer. Already ambitious, he broke off his first betrothal to make a more politically useful marriage with Cornelia, daughter of the powerful statesman Lucius Cornelius Cinna; their only child, Julia, was born in 76 BC.

  After originally training for the priesthood Caesar became a lawyer. Sent east on a mission to Bithynia, near Pontus, he returned as something of a dandy inspired by Hellenistic fashions. It was said that ‘his dress, it seems, was unusual: he had added wrist-length sleeves with fringes to his purple-striped senatorial tunic, and the belt which he wore over it was never tightly fastened — hence Sulla’s warning to the aristocratic party “Beware of that boy with the loose clothes”.’

  By contrast, he became well known for his plain speaking. Once his rather high-pitched delivery had been improved by a speech coach from Rhodes, Caesar became a great orator, emphasising his points by vigorous gesticulation. Even the hypercritical Cicero was moved to ask, ‘Do you know of any man who, even if he has concentrated on the art of oratory to the exclusion of all else, can speak better than Caesar? Or anyone who makes so many witty remarks? Or whose vocabulary is so varied and yet so exact?’

  On his way to study in Rhodes, Caesar had been kidnapped by Cilician pirates who put a ransom of twenty talents on his head. Claiming to be worth at least fifty, he told the pirates that once free he would track them down and kill them; this caused much amusement among his captors, who let him go on payment of the ransom. Unfortunately for them, the twenty-six-year-old Caesar had been serious and set great store by keeping his word. He obtained some ships, caught up with the pirates and executed them by the standard Roman method of crucifixion — albeit cutting their throats as an act of mercy because they had treated him well.

  Following a spell of military experience for which he received the oak wreath for valour, Caesar joined the staff of the millionaire general Crassus. After the death of his first wife whom he honoured with a public obituary, most unusual for a Roman woman, Caesar married Pompeius’ cousin Pompeia and was posted to Spain, where the sight of Alexander the Great’s statue at the port of Gadir (Cadiz) made him deeply despondent. Comparing his own achievements at the age of thirty-two with those of Alexander who had already conquered much of the known world, Caesar also felt upstaged by Pompeius who had taken Alexander’s epithet ‘Great’ and most of the east.

  Yet Caesar had decided on an alliance and, marrying his daughter Julia to Pompeius,
joined with him and his old boss Crassus to form the first Triumvirate in 60 BC. As effective rulers of Rome, they sold the title ‘friend and ally of the Roman people’ to Cleopatra’s father Auletes, and when he was deposed the following year Caesar decided to try his luck there.

  But when he failed to be elected Governor-General of Egypt he went instead to Gaul in an attempt to pacify the unruly northern parts, make a name for himself, compete with Pompeius — and plunder with impunity.

  In his own accounts Caesar dispassionately describes his encounters with a whole host of peoples, from the ferocious Suebi of Germany, whose elaborately tall hairstyles enhanced their stature in battle, to the Gallic religious leaders he termed ‘druides’, an elite ruling class he equated with the Roman Senate. He also produced the first eyewitness account of Britain, a land in such unchartered territory that many Romans doubted it even existed.

  Yet Caesar may well have known that the Greek sailor Pytheas had circumnavigated Britain in the 320s BC, and with his subsequent account ‘On the Ocean’ housed in Alexandria’s royal library and familiar to its head librarian Eratosthenes, at least one Ptolemaic merchant ship had traveled to ‘Britannike’ in the second century BC.

  In his account, written as always in the third person, Caesar claimed to have invaded Britain in August 556 BC ‘because he knew that in almost all the Gallic campaigns the Gauls had received reinforcements from the Britons. Even if there was no time for a campaign that season, he thought it would be of great advantage to him merely to visit the island, to see what its inhabitants were like, and to make himself acquainted with the lie of the land, the harbours and the landing-places’ — not to mention its rumoured sources of pearls, a commodity for which Pompeius had already received great plaudits in Rome.

  Disembarking at Walmer in Kent in August 55 BC, Caesar and 10,000 troops were met by the locals, armed and ready in chariots, with bristling hair and their bodies stained with blue woad plant dye ‘which gives them a more terrifying appearance in battle’. It was also well known that the Celts, like the Thracians, severed the heads of fallen enemies, and in a practice not unfamiliar to Kleopatra’s relatives, ‘embalm in cedar-oil and carefully preserve in a chest, and these they exhibit to strangers’.

  Consisting of little more than a fortnight in Kent, this first invasion had largely been a means of winning support in Rome where it proved an incredible propaganda success. As the first time the Roman army had successfully ventured into unchartered territory, the senate voted a twenty-day period of thanksgiving, the longest ever awarded a Roman general.

  Spurred on by his success, Caesar initiated plans for a repeat performance the following year. Some of his ships were pounded to pieces by the waves off the Kent coast, as they had been on the first occasion, but with the reinforcement came tragic news. His daughter Julia had died giving birth to Pompeius’ child, Caesar’s grandchild, which itself survived for only a few days. Although Pompeius had wanted to bury them on one of his lavish estates, the crowds had intervened and given Julia a great cremation on the Field of Mars as a gesture to her popular father.

  In typical fashion, Caesar took the news stoically, revealing little of the grief he must have expressed in private and pressing on with matters at hand as a welcome distraction. After taking a major hill fort near St Albans in late July, he heard that rebellion had again broken out in Gaul, so moved back to the coast. From here he wrote up his report and sent a number of letters back to Rome. Knowing full well that whatever he told the gossip-loving Cicero would be swiftly relayed to everyone else, Caesar described his time in the land with ‘astonishing masses of cliff, noting the island’s supplies of iron, tin, beef and grain.

  Caesar finally left Britain in late September, accepting the surrender of the tribal leader Cassivellaunus and taking hostages and tribute, including freshwater pearls which ‘he weighed with his own hand to judge their value’. Both his British invasions had been a massive PR success, even if his critics claimed there had been little plunder. Despite the freshwater pearls, Cicero told his friends that there wasn’t a single ounce of silver in Britain and he doubted whether any of the British slaves had any literary or musical taste. Yet the fair appearance and blue-stained skin of these ‘sky-blue Britons’ did cause a minor fashion craze as Roman ladies tried to replicate their ‘azure beauty’.

  With a third of Rome’s population made up of slaves, Caesar himself took pains to buy the best: ‘So high were the prices he paid on slaves of good character and attainments that he became ashamed of his extravagance and would not allow the sums to be entered in his accounts’. He was also able to provide many of his troops with a slave each following the surrender of Gaul, but news of the terrible massacres which had accompanied his conquests of Gaul and Germany was seized on by his opponents in Rome. They demanded he face trial as a war criminal until his huge territorial gains overruled such concerns. Yet, unlike many of his accusers, Caesar had little racial prejudice and numbered Gauls amongst his associates.

  In the manner of Alexander, Caesar ‘always led his army, more often on foot than in the saddle’, advising them to ‘keep a close eye on me!’ and expecting them to follow. Again like his hero, he was extremely popular with his troops whom he addressed as ‘comrades’, as opposed to other Roman leaders who felt the term too familiar. He judged his men for their fighting abilities rather than their morals and allowed them to relax off duty however they wished, answering critics by claiming that, ‘My men fight just as well when they are stinking of perfume’. Yet he did expect them to be well turned out. As a well-known dandy himself, his customized toga with eastern-style fringing which echoed Alexander’s penchant for foreign attire was complemented by a number of rings, and he also liked to wear the wreaths of laurel or oak leaves awarded for military successes. Apart from displaying his status, they disguised his thinning fair hair more effectively than his usual method. For ‘he used to comb the thin strands of his hair forward from his poll’ since his baldness was ‘a disfigurement which his enemies harped upon, much to his exasperation’.

  Yet despite a receding hairline and thirty-year age gap, the man who appeared to Cleopatra that night in Alexandria as she pulled back her veil was still ‘tall, fair and well built with a rather broad face and keen dark brown eyes’. There was clearly a sexual attraction between them, and given Caesar’s incredibly promiscuous track record it seems highly unlikely that the two simply shook hands. Having done her homework, Cleopatra had already ‘discovered his disposition which was very susceptible, to such an extent that he had his intrigues with ever so many women — with all, doubtless, who chanced to come his way’.

  For in addition to his one betrothal and marriages to Cornelia and Pompeia, he had next married Calpurnia, daughter of the influential and very wealthy Lucius Calpurnius Piso. He also maintained a long-term relationship with Servilia, mother of the staunch young Republican Brutus, and ‘his affairs with women are commonly described as numerous and extravagant: among those of noble birth who he is said to have seduced were Servius Sulpicius’ wife Postumia; Aulus Gabinius’ wife Lollia; Marcus Crassus’ wife Tertulla; and even Gnaeus Pompeius’ wife Mucia’. The wives of his closest colleagues were a valuable source of information to him. Yet he divorced his second wife, Pompeia, after she herself was alleged to be having an affair. Her lover’s attempts to infiltrate Caesar’s house, heavily disguised as a woman, caused such a scandal that Caesar claimed he had little choice but to terminate the marriage, since ‘Caesar’s wife must be above suspicion’.

  With no such qualms himself, there were claims of him fathering children as far away as Gaul. His soldiers were so proud of their leader’s reputation that whenever they returned to Rome they marched along to the strains of their favourite ditty: ‘Home we bring our bald whoremonger, Romans lock your wives away! All the bags of gold you lent him went his Gallic tarts to pay!’ In Spain, he made the acquaintance of numerous local women in the company of his like-minded chief of staff, who went by
the delightful nickname of ‘Mentula’, ‘Penis’. Persistent rumours surrounding Caesar’s time in Bithynia claim that he even had an affair with its king, Nicomedes. The details were salaciously relayed by Cicero: ‘Caesar was led by Nicomedes’ attendants to the royal bedchamber, where he lay on a golden couch, dressed in a purple shift ... So this decendant of Venus lost his virginity in Bithynia’. His troops found this most amusing, as did, the young poet Catullus, calling Caesar a ‘pansy Romulus’ until his father made him apologise.

  Yet despite his well-deserved reputation as ‘every woman’s husband and every man’s wife’, most Romans would remember the episode in which their noble general was the one who was seduced. Claiming that Cleopatra had entered the palace ‘without Caesar’s knowledge — the disgrace of Egypt, promiscuous to the harm of Rome’, they ignored the fact that she was simply returning to her own home. Running with their theme of ‘lecherous prostitute queen’, they described her as a woman ‘worn among her own household slaves’. As their stories grew in the telling, ‘she became so debauched that she often sold herself as a prostitute; but she was so beautiful that many men bought a night with her at the price of their own death’; reluctant to dismiss such lurid images, modern accounts still claim that Cleopatra had ‘the power of the courtesan — and she exploited it professionally’.