Alexandria’s ninety-foot-wide main avenue left visitors speechless, its scale unmatched in the ancient world. You could lose a day exploring it from end to end. Lined with delicately carved columns, silk awnings, and richly painted facades, the Canopic Way could accommodate eight chariots driving abreast. The city’s primary side streets too were nearly twenty feet wide, paved with stones, expertly drained, and partially lit at night. From its central crossroads—a ten-minute walk from the palace—a forest of sparkling limestone colonnades extended as far as the eye could see. On the city’s western side lived most of its Egyptian population, many of them linen weavers, clustered around the hundred steps that led up to the Serapeum, the third-century temple that dominated the city and housed its secondary library. That rectangular temple—much of it decorated in gold leaf, silver, and bronze—stood on a rocky, artificial hill, surrounded by parks and porticoes. It is one of only three monuments of Cleopatra’s day that we can locate with accuracy today. The city’s Jewish quarter stood in the northeast, next to the palace. Greeks occupied the fine three-story houses at the center of town. Industry divided neighborhoods as welclass="underline" one quarter was devoted to the manufacture of perfumes and to the fabrication of their alabaster pots, another to glassworkers.
From east to west the city measured nearly four miles, a wonderland of baths, theaters, gymnasiums, courts, temples, shrines, and synagogues. A limestone wall surrounded its perimeter, punctuated by towers, patrolled at both ends of the Canopic Way by prostitutes. During the day Alexandria echoed with the sounds of horses’ hooves, the cries of porridge sellers or chickpea vendors, street performers, soothsayers, moneylenders. Its spice stands released exotic aromas, carried through the streets by a thick, salty sea breeze. Long-legged white and black ibises assembled at every intersection, foraging for crumbs. Until well into the evening, when the vermilion sun plunged precipitously into the harbor, Alexandria remained a swirl of reds and yellows, a swelling kaleidoscope of music, chaos, and color. Altogether it was a mood-altering city of extreme sensuality and high intellectualism, the Paris of the ancient world: superior in its ways, splendid in its luxuries, the place to go to spend your fortune, write your poetry, find (or forget) a romance, restore your health, reinvent yourself, or regroup after having conquered vast swaths of Italy, Spain, and Greece over the course of a Herculean decade.
Given the transporting beauty and rapturous entertainments, Alexandria was not a city into which one sank passively. As a visitor noted, “It is not easy for a stranger to endure the clamor of so great a multitude or to face these tens of thousands unless he comes provided with a lute and a song.” Alexandrians embraced their reputation for frivolity. And through the massive portal of the palace hordes of well-wishers and Roman associates thronged at the war’s conclusion, gathering in the ivory-paneled entrance hall. With its array of banqueting rooms, that complex could accommodate a vast crowd; its largest hall was furnished with a dazzling collection of couches, sculpted of bronze, inlaid with ivory and glass, works of art unto themselves. Egypt imported its silver but long controlled the greatest gold reserve of the ancient world; the beams of that hall may have been themselves overlaid with gold. It is easy to inflate the city’s population, difficult to overstate its magnificence. It taxed the vocabularies even of the ancients. Plenty of wealthy Alexandrian households boasted furniture of Lebanon cedar inlaid with ivory and mother-of-pearl, sophisticated trompe l’oeil, and intricate, realistic mosaics. Slabs of caramel-colored alabaster sheathed exteriors. Interior walls shimmered with enamels and emeralds. Where wall decoration yielded to murals, mythological scenes predominated. The quality of the work was an astonishment.
The floor mosaics were in particular worked with a remarkable precision, heavy on geometrics, often three-dimensional in feel, implausibly realistic in their depictions of the natural world. At banquets those intricacies vanished under lush carpets of lilies and roses, with which Egypt was abundantly supplied. “The general rule,” gushed one chronicler, “is that no flower, including roses, snowdrops, or anything else, ever completely stops blooming.” Strewn in heaps over the floors, they lent the impression of a country meadow, if one littered at meal’s end by oyster shells, lobster claws, and peach pits. There was nothing rare about a banquet order for three hundred crowns of roses, or for as many braided garlands. (Roses were crucial, their fragrance believed to prevent intoxication.) Perfumes and unguents were Alexandrian specialties; attendants sprinkled cinnamon and cardamom and balsam perfumes on banqueters’ crowns as musicians played or storytellers performed. Fragrance rippled not only from the table but from jewelry, perfumed lamps, soles of shoes; the heavy scents of the oils inevitably flavored the dinner. The wares of the city’s other preeminent artisans were on display as welclass="underline" Tables glinted with silver basins, pitchers, hundreds of candelabra. Blown glass was a Hellenistic invention on which Alexandria had worked its usual magic, gilding the already elaborate lily; the city’s glassblowers threaded gold into their work. On the table polychromatic vessels joined silver platters, woven ivory breadbaskets, jewel-encrusted tumblers. The meal itself appeared on gold dishes; at one Ptolemaic feast, the dinner vessels alone were said to have weighed three hundred tons. That tableware showcased both Cleopatra’s adaptability and her competitive instinct. When Alexandrian luxury began to make itself felt in the Roman world, Cleopatra renamed her ostentatious tableware. Her elaborate gold and silver place settings became her “ordinary ware.”
To one guest a palace dinner itself appeared as a fortune rather than a meal. He gaped at “a silver platter covered with heavy gold plate, and large enough to hold a huge roast piglet lying on its back and displaying its belly, which was full of many delicious items; for inside it were roast thrushes, ducks, and an immense quantity of warblers, as well as egg yolks, oysters, and scallops.” Geese were standard fare on the prodigal menus, along with peacocks, oysters, sea urchins, sturgeon, and red mullet, the delicacies of the Mediterranean world. (Spoons were rare, forks unknown. One ate with one’s fingers.) Sweet wines—the best came from Syria and Ionia—were spiced with honey or pomegranate. We have no trace of the wardrobe in which Cleopatra presided over these festivities, though we know that she wore plenty of pearls, the diamonds of the day. She coiled long ropes of pearls around her neck and braided more into her hair. She wore others sewn into the fabric of her tunics. Those were ankle-length and lavishly colored, of fine Chinese silk or gauzy linen, traditionally worn belted, or with a brooch or ribbon. Over the tunic went an often transparent mantle, through which the bright folds of fabric were clearly visible. On her feet Cleopatra wore jeweled sandals with patterned soles. Among the greatest hosts in history, the Ptolemies sent their guests stumbling home with gifts. It was not unusual to make off with a place setting of solid silver, a slave, a gazelle, a gold sofa, a horse in silver armor. Excess had put the Ptolemies on the map, where Cleopatra fully intended the dynasty to remain. Such were the “prolonged parties until dawn” of which Suetonius would write later.