It is difficult to determine which came first, whether Isis accounted for the supremacy of women in Egypt, or whether the Ptolemaic queens reinforced her eminence.* Certainly she introduced an equality of the sexes. In some accounts, Isis grants women the same strength as men. She was in any event a perfect boon to Cleopatra. To celebrate Caesarion’s birth, the new mother ordered coins struck on which he is depicted as Horus, Isis’s infant son. (The imagery was conveniently bilingual. It read just as easily as Aphrodite with Eros.) Future events would only reinforce Cleopatra’s identification with Isis, into whose role she would step more fully and literally than had any previous Ptolemy. On ceremonial occasions she assumed her guise, appearing in a full, finely pleated linen mantle of iridescent stripes, fringed at the bottom, tightly wrapped from right hip to left shoulder and knotted between the breasts. Under it she wore a snug Greek sheath, or chiton. Corkscrew curls fell around her neck. On her head she wore a diadem or, on religious occasions, a traditional pharaonic crown of feathers, solar disk, and cow’s horns. Forty-seven years later the protean Isis would cede her place to a very different single mother, who appropriated her imagery wholesale.
Motherhood not only enhanced Cleopatra’s authority—in her day the Egyptian queen was more earth mother than femme fatale—but solidified her links with the native priests, to whom she granted significant privileges. In this she continued the work of her father. Even while abroad he had distinguished himself as a prolific builder of temples and had cultivated his relations with the Egyptian clergy. They were central to order amid the native populace, also intimately engaged with matters of state. As the temples stood at the center of both religious and commercial life, there was an interpenetration of the Greek bureaucracy and the Egyptian hierarchy. The minister of finance might equally supervise the feeding of the sacred animals. The priest in charge of cult revenues for special occasions might double as a reed merchant. Those with weighty titles at the Temple of Memphis held equally weighty titles in the world of commerce and occupied privileged positions at Cleopatra’s court. The relationship was symbiotic: a god on earth, a pharaoh was as necessary to the priests theologically as were the priests to Cleopatra economically and politically. Priests functioned as lawyers and notaries, the temples as manufacturing centers, cultural institutions, economic hubs. You might visit one to work up a contract, or consult a doctor, or borrow a sack of grain. A temple could grant refuge within its walls, a right Cleopatra extended in 46 to an Isis shrine, toward the end of her reign to a synagogue in the southern delta. (It may have represented her half of a bargain. The Jews of the region were fine soldiers; Cleopatra needed an army at the time.) In principle, no one granted asylum could be driven or dragged away. It was where you withdrew when you had had the temerity to organize a strike. The temples lent money, even, on occasion, to Ptolemies.
It was as well the priests’ responsibility to monitor every mood of the Nile, with which Egypt’s fortunes literally rose and fell. The river could deliver bountiful riches or considerable disaster. A flood of twenty-four feet induced delirium. Twenty-one feet brought good cheer. Eighteen feet—a season in which the blue-gray sludge clung to the riverbanks and sullenly refused to extend itself over the land—signaled a season of trouble. Such had been the case the previous year, when the Nile appeared to have been as out of joint as the times. As Cleopatra had observed on her clandestine trip to Alexandria, the flood of 48 was disastrous. In the end it measured only seven and a half feet, the lowest rise on record. (With the drought the Egyptian economy had ground to a halt, another reason anti-Roman recruits had been easy to come by that fall.) The river dictated intimate family relations as much as it did national policy. One son signed an agreement with his mother: he was to supply her with specific quantities of wheat, oil, and salt unless the river fell beneath a certain level, at which point she was to do his housekeeping. Many temples had Nilotic measuring columns, monitored secretly and obsessively by their priests. Daily they compared those figures to the previous year’s. From them Cleopatra’s officials could assess harvests and calculate taxes. Given the mania for measures and comparative data, it makes sense that geometry came of age in Egypt.
The fixation on past performances accounted for the embrace of history as well, although that discipline was less exact. Feeding the people was paramount, a mandate on which Cleopatra prided herself. She depicted herself as the Lady of Abundance for good reason; she stood between her subjects and hunger. Given the rigors of the system, they could manage no reserves. In a crisis Cleopatra had no choice but to authorize distributions from crown warehouses. “There was no famine during my reign” was a popular and gratifying phrase for a monarch to inscribe on his or her temples. Ancient propaganda served the same ends as its modern counterpart, however. There appears to have been little correlation between the alimentary reality and that sunny assertion, as often as not patently false.
BY THE MIDDLE of 47 Cleopatra was free of conspiring court officials and relieved of all antagonistic family members. Civil disturbance was at a minimum. She had her hands full all the same. “Anyone familiar with the wearying work required of kings by all those letters they must read or write would not bother even to pick up a diadem from the ground,” an earlier Hellenistic monarch had groaned. And he had no experience of lush Ptolemaic bureaucracy, the natural fruit of an administration-proud, papyrus-rich culture with a planned and centralized economy and an unaccountable passion for records and censuses. The Greek historian Diodorus outlined another first-century sovereign’s schedule, some version of which would have been Cleopatra’s as well. After being awakened, she waded through sheafs of dispatches from every quarter. Her advisers briefed her on affairs of state. She corresponded with high priests and fellow sovereigns. If they were well, if their public and private affairs proceeded satisfactorily, then—went the formulaic greeting—she was well. She handed down decisions. She dictated memorandums to various scribes and signed off—sometimes with a single, powerful word meaning, “Let it be done”—on others. Only later was she bathed and dressed, perfumed and made up, after which she offered smoky sacrifices to the gods. At some appointed afternoon hour she received callers, on state, temple, and judicial business. Those audiences could be stultifying; they had lulled an earlier Ptolemy to sleep. Cleopatra’s responsibilities very nearly rivaled those of Isis: She not only dispensed justice, commanded the army and navy, regulated the economy, negotiated with foreign powers, and presided over the temples, but determined the prices of raw materials and supervised the sowing schedules, the distribution of seed, the condition of Egypt’s canals, the food supply. She was magistrate, high priest, queen, and goddess. She was also—on a day-to-day basis and far more frequently—chief executive officer. She headed both the secular and the religious bureaucracies. She was Egypt’s merchant in chief. The crush of state business consumed most of her day. And as that early, weary Hellenistic monarch had acknowledged, absolute power consumes absolutely.
A vast, entrenched bureaucracy answered to Cleopatra. On the local level regional clerks and subclerks, village heads, scribes, tax collectors, and police did her bidding. On the national level a chief finance and interior minister, her dioiketes, oversaw the functioning of the state, with a horde of subordinates. Close at hand Cleopatra employed personal secretaries, writers of memorandums, an inner circle of advisers, foreign ministers, philosophers. Both Greeks and Greek-speaking Egyptians held those privileged positions, which came with resonant, familial-sounding titles: if you were particularly powerful, you figured among the Order of First Friends, or the Order of Successors. Some of those advisers Cleopatra had known and trusted since her childhood; she retained them from her father’s regime. With several—the dioiketes, for example—she was in constant contact. She reviewed her secretary’s official journal daily.