The postwar festivities would certainly have included a victory procession, presumably down the Canopic Way. Cleopatra needed to unite her people, to assert her political supremacy, and to cement her claim over her detractors. Alexandria had long been a city of parades and pageantry, displays in which the wealth of the Ptolemies surpassed even the recreational fervor of their subjects. Centuries earlier a Dionysian procession had introduced gilded twenty-foot floats to the city streets, each requiring 180 men to coax it along. Purple-painted satyrs and gold-garlanded nymphs followed, along with allegorical representations of kings, gods, cities, seasons. A center of mechanical marvels, Alexandria boasted automatic doors and hydraulic lifts, hidden treadmills and coin-operated machines. With invisible wires, siphons, pulleys, and magnets the Ptolemies could work miracles. Fires erupted and died down; lights flickered from statues’ eyes; trumpets blared spontaneously. For the early procession, the city’s ingenious metalworkers outdid themselves: A fifteen-foot-tall statue in a yellow spangled tunic floated through the streets. She rose to her full height, poured offerings of milk, then magically reseated herself, enthralling the crowds. Around her the air was thick with the buzz of anticipation, the murmurs of admiration, the music of flutes. Clouds of incense—essentially moneyed air—settled on the spectators, for whom the burnished wonders continued: golden torch carriers, chests of frankincense and myrrh, gilded palm trees, grapevines, breastplates, shields, statues, basins, gold-adorned oxen. Atop one cart, sixty satyrs trampled grapes, singing as they did so, accompanied by pipers. Vast skins disgorged scented wine into the streets; the air was sweetened first by incense, again by those fragrant streams, a heady combination. Attendants released doves and pigeons over the course of the procession, each with ribbons dangling from its feet. A display of animals was obligatory for the subjects who had traveled to Alexandria and pitched tents for miles around. The third-century procession had included troops of decorated donkeys; elephants shod with gold embroidered slippers; teams of oryxes, leopards, peacocks, enormous lions, an Ethiopian rhinoceros, ostriches, an albino bear, 2,400 dogs. Camels carried loads of saffron and cinnamon. Behind them paraded 200 bulls with gilded horns. Lyre players followed, along with 57,000 infantry and 23,000 cavalry in full armor. Cleopatra would not have had those battalions but would all the same have mustered an extravagant display. The point was to advertise oneself, among monarchs, as “the shrewdest amasser of wealth, the most splendid spendthrift, and the most magnificent in all works.” Affluence, power, and legitimacy were inextricably bound together. Especially after the convulsions of the previous decades, it was essential that she confirm her authority.
Caesar may well have stayed to that end. A stable Egypt was as critical to his plans as to Cleopatra’s. Nearly alone in the Mediterranean, Egypt produced more grain than it consumed. Cleopatra could single-handedly feed Rome. The reverse was also true; she could starve that city if she cared to. For that reason Caesar was disinclined to install a countryman in Alexandria. A reliable non-Roman was the best solution. It is clear that Caesar trusted Cleopatra as he could not have trusted Pothinus, equally clear that he had confidence in her ability to rule. Strictly speaking, her Egypt became as of 47 a protectorate with an intimate twist. That arrangement was by no means unorthodox in a century when politics were markedly personal. Hellenistic alliances were regularly ratified with wedding vows. In Rome mercenary marriages were the order of the day, to the dismay of the purists, who railed at that brand of cheap, expedient diplomacy. The more ambitious the politician, the more variegated the marriages. Pompey had wed five times, always for political reasons. Caesar’s tumultuous career was closely tied to each of his four wives. Despite an age difference comparable to that between Caesar and Cleopatra, Pompey had married Caesar’s daughter, sent to him as a sort of thank-you note.* Relations between the two men soured only when the woman who bound them died, a history that would shortly repeat itself, with far greater repercussions.
Caesar and Cleopatra’s relationship was unusual not only for its national differences, but because Cleopatra entered into it of her own will. No male relative forced her hand. To a Roman, that was highly discomfiting. Had her father in his lifetime married her to Caesar (an impossibility on any number of counts), she would have been seen altogether differently. What unsettled those who wrote her history was her independence of mind, the enterprising spirit. The poet Lucan is clear on this point. “Cleopatra has been able to capture the old man with magic,” he has Pothinus exclaim, in a broad redefinition of free will. Already in possession of Egypt, she in his account subsequently “whores to gain Rome.” Here too there were instructive parallels. The story would later be told of an early Indian monarch, Queen Cleophis. She “surrendered to Alexander but subsequently regained her throne, which she ransomed by sleeping with him, attaining by sexual favors what she could not by force of arms.” According to a Roman historian at least, for her degrading behavior Cleophis earned the epithet “royal whore.” The story may well be apocryphal, another lurid Roman fantasy about the beguiling East. It may even have been Cleopatra-inflected. But it tells us something of Cleopatra. She was as suspect as Queen Cleophis, though what the Romans mostly seized upon—what inspired backhanded tributes—was her uncanny, occult power.
That an easy rapport if not a great passion developed between Cleopatra and Caesar was unsurprising. Her aplomb and his gamble may have clinched the deal, but their personalities were as neatly matched as their political agendas. They were congenial, charismatic, quick-tongued people, if only one of them would go down in history as having been so seductive as to be dangerous. Cleopatra especially knew how to ingratiate. Where there had been thought to be four kinds of flattery, Plutarch sputtered, always on guard against that noxious brew, “she had a thousand.” We have more tributes to the caress of her wit than to Caesar’s; his is to be read less in his language than in his innumerable affairs. He was a masterly seducer, with a specialty in aristocratic wives. Both Cleopatra and Caesar manifested the intellectual curiosity that was the trademark of their age, a lightheartedness and a humor that set them apart from their peers, insofar as either had peers. Such an unsociable, solitary thing is power, notes Plutarch; generally those around Caesar and Cleopatra could be relied upon to fawn or plot. Both knew, as Caesar put it, that success came at a price, that “everything that lifts people above their fellows arouses both emulation and jealousy.” Theirs was an exclusive brand of social isolation.
Both had daringly crossed lines in their bids for power; both had let the dice fly. Both had as great a capacity for work as for play and rarely distinguished between the two. Caesar answered letters and petitions while attending games. Cleopatra engaged in games for reasons of state. Neither shrank from drama. Both were natural performers, as secure in their ability as in the conviction of their superiority. Much was expected of Cleopatra, who liked to surprise, believed in the grand geste, and did not sell herself short. Caesar put a premium on style and admired talent in all its forms; in Alexandria he was in the constant company of a deft conversationalist, linguist, and negotiator, one who shared his unusual gift for treating new acquaintances as if they were old intimates. There was ample reason on his part for close attention. Cleopatra provided a timely lesson in comportment. Having the year before been declared dictator, Caesar was enjoying his first taste of absolute power. Cleopatra moreover handled matters no woman of his acquaintance had touched. He would have been hard pressed to find a woman in all of Rome who had raised an army, lent a fleet, controlled a currency. As incandescent as was her personality, Cleopatra was every bit Caesar’s equal as a coolheaded, clear-eyed pragmatist, though what passed on his part as strategy would be remembered on hers as manipulation. Both were emerging from wars that had nothing to do with issues and everything to do with personalities. They had faced similar difficulties, with similar constituencies. Caesar was no favorite of the Roman aristocracy. Cleopatra was unloved by the Alexandrian Greeks. Their power derived from the common people. The ambitious shine especially in the company of the ambitious; Caesar and Cleopatra came together as might two heirs to legendary fortunes, larger than life and abundantly aware of their gifts, who are accustomed to thinking of themselves in the plural, or writing of themselves in the third person.