Auletes’ reunion with his second daughter was presumably of a different flavor. In light of her sister’s overreaching, thirteen-year-old Cleopatra was now first in line to the throne. Already she had absorbed a great deal in addition to the training in declamation, rhetoric, and philosophy. Her political education could be said to have been completed in 56; she would draw heavily on this chapter a decade later. To be pharaoh was good. To be a friend and ally of Rome was better. The question was not how to resist that power, like Mithradates, who had made a career of goading, defying, and massacring Romans, but how best to manipulate it. Fortunately, Roman politics were highly personal, due to a clash of senatorial ambitions. With shrewdness it was fairly easy to pit the key players against one another. To an early education in pageantry Cleopatra added a first-class introduction to intrigue. She had been in the palace while Egyptian forces girded against her father on his return. By 48, she was working from a playbook Auletes had handed down to her earlier, and for the second time from a palace under siege. Her alliance with Caesar was a direct descendant of her father’s with Pompey, the greatest difference being that she accomplished in a matter of days what took her father more than two decades.
Five years after the return, Auletes died, of natural causes. He was in his midsixties and had had ample time to prepare his succession. It is possible that, as his eldest surviving daughter, Cleopatra served briefly as his co-regent in his final months, certain that—unlike so many of her ancestors, including Auletes himself—she was actively groomed for the throne. Auletes departed from tradition in leaving the throne to two siblings, which would seem to indicate either that Cleopatra manifested exceptional promise at an early age, that Auletes felt he was heading off a power struggle by appointing the two jointly, or that he believed Cleopatra and Ptolemy XIII inseparable, hardly the case. Most likely father and daughter were particularly close. She went out of her way to acknowledge him, appending “father-loving” to her title and preserving it there, despite a change of consort. One of her first acts would have been to see to the funeral arrangements for her father, a protracted, incense- and unguent-heavy affair, punctuated by offerings, and loud with ritual laments. At eighteen she stepped briskly and vigorously into the role of queen.
Almost immediately she had the chance to embrace the wisdom of her father, who on arrival in Egypt had made a point of paying tribute to the native gods, in small villages and at cult centers. To do so was to secure the devotion of the Egyptian population. They revered their pharaoh as thoroughly as the unruly Alexandrians tested him. A smart Ptolemy dedicated temples to Egyptian gods and underwrote their cult; Cleopatra needed the support, and the manpower, of the indigenous population. Well before her coronation the Buchis bull had died. One of several sacred bulls, he was closely associated with the sun and war gods; his cult thrived near Thebes, in Upper Egypt. Roundly worshipped, the bull traveled by special barge in the company of his dedicated staff. He appeared at public events in gold and lapis. In the open air he was fitted with a net over his face, so as not to be pestered by flies. He lived about twenty years, after which he was replaced by a carefully chosen successor, who bore the singular markings—a white body and a black face—of a sacred animal. Within weeks of Auletes’ death, Cleopatra seized the opportunity to shore up a core constituency. In full ceremonial dress she appears to have sailed with the royal fleet six hundred miles upriver toward Thebes, to lead an elaborate, floating procession. All the priests of Egypt converged for that momentous occasion, held during the full moon. Amid a crush of pilgrims, “the Queen, the Lady of the two Lands, the goddess who loves her father,” rowed the new bull to his installation on the west bank of the Nile, a strong and unusual vote in support of the native Egyptians. Within the temple sanctuary, amid a throng of officials and white-robed priests, Cleopatra three days later presided over the bull’s inauguration. The area was familiar and well disposed to her. As a fugitive in 49, she would take refuge there.
Several times in the early years of her reign she inserted herself into the native cult. She offered assistance as well with the burial of the most important of the sacred bulls, that of Memphis. She contributed to his cult expenses, which were high, and provided generous rations of wine, beans, bread, and oil for his officials. There is no question that the pageantry—and the unusual appearance of a Ptolemy—worked an effect: as she made her regal way up the sphinx-lined causeway to the richly painted temple in 51, Cleopatra “was seen by all.” We have the description from a line of hieroglyphics, a ceremonial language with a distinct political purpose, perhaps best described as “boasting made permanent.” There is evidence in Cleopatra’s first year of her ambition as well. Her brother’s name is absent from official documents, where he should have figured as Cleopatra’s superior. Nor is he in evidence on her coins; Cleopatra’s commanding portrait appears alone. Coinage qualifies as a kind of language, too. It is the only one in which she speaks to us in her own voice, without Roman interpreters. This was how she presented herself to her subjects.
She was less adept at assimilating the lesson of Berenice. Pothinus, Achillas, and Theodotus took poorly to this independent-minded upstart, so intent on ruling alone. They had a formidable ally in the Nile, which refused to cooperate with the new queen. The country’s well-being depended entirely on the height of the flood; drought compromised the food supply and the social order. The flood of 51 was poor, that of the following summer little better. Priests complained of shortages that prevented them from performing rituals. Towns emptied as hungry villagers poured into Alexandria. Thieves roamed the land. Prices increased dramatically; the distress was universal. By October 50, when it became clear that drastic measures were in order, Cleopatra’s brother was back on the scene. At the end of that month the royal couple jointly issued an emergency decree. They rerouted wheat and dried vegetables from the countryside north. Hungry Alexandrians were more dangerous than hungry villagers; it was in everyone’s best interest to appease them. The edict was to be reinforced in the time-honored way: Offenders received a death sentence. Denunciations were encouraged, informants richly rewarded. (A free man received a third of the guilty party’s property. A slave obtained a sixth, along with his freedom.) At the same time, Ptolemy XIII and Cleopatra offered incentives to those who remained behind to cultivate the land. Either some oppressing or some coercing took place in those months at the palace as well. The two siblings may have been working in tandem for the good of the country. Or Ptolemy may have been undermining his sister, starving her constituents for the sake of his. Both siblings issued the emergency edict. Cleopatra’s name appears second.
Already on treacherous ground, she twice over the next year fell into the trap that had swallowed her father. At the end of June 50, two sons of the Roman governor of Syria arrived in Alexandria, to coax the troops who had restored Auletes to return to the fold. They were needed elsewhere. Those soldiers had no interest in leaving Egypt, where Auletes had amply rewarded them for their service, and where many had started families. They emphatically declined the invitation, by murdering the governor’s sons. Cleopatra might have meted out justice herself but opted instead to secure Rome’s goodwill with a theatrical flourish: she sent the murderers to Syria in chains, a move she should have known would cost her the support of the army. And she continued to trade one vulnerability for another. Roman requests for military assistance were as common in Alexandria as were requests for dynastic interventions in Rome. They were not universally granted, although Auletes had initially won Pompey’s favor by providing him with troops. In 49 Pompey’s son made a similar request of Cleopatra, applying for assistance in his father’s campaign against Caesar. Cleopatra faithfully offered up grain, soldiers, and a fleet, all at a time of dire agricultural distress. This was most likely her Cyprus. Within months her name disappears from all documentation, and she had fled for her life, to wind up camped in the Syrian desert with her band of mercenaries.