Nowhere was the Eastern influence so profoundly felt as in the triumphs Caesar celebrated at the end of September. A Roman general knew no greater glory than those elaborate, self-aggrandizing entertainments. And Caesar had particular reason to take his to new heights. Rome had long been fitful, unsettled by a protracted war and his extended absence. What better way to tame it than with an unprecedented eleven days of public festivities? At such times a general became an impresario; in celebrating his conquests of Gaul, Alexandria, Pontus, Africa, and Spain, Caesar outdid himself, consciously or not vying with the kind of staging he had witnessed in Alexandria. After massive preparations and several disappointing delays, the celebrations began on September 21, 46. They lasted through the first days of October. Rome filled with raucous spectators, only a fraction of whom could be accommodated. Many pitched tents in the city streets and along the roads. In throngs they flocked to the feasts, the parades, and the entertainments; some were trampled to death in the pandemonium. Temples and streets were decorated, temporary stadiums constructed, racecourses expanded. Glory had long been the currency of Rome, but it had never before been a city in which forty elephants bearing lit torches in their trunks escorted a general home at the end of a day’s festivities, a parade of revelers and musicians trailing behind. Nor had Rome ever seen banquets of delicacies and fine wines for 66,000 people.
Cleopatra may have already been installed in Caesar’s villa by late summer, when he celebrated his Egyptian triumph. Trumpets heralded his approach that morning; in his purple tunic, a wreath of laurels on his bald head, he rode through the city gates in a chariot drawn by four white horses. The crowd greeted him with rose petals and applause. His exultant men marched beside him in metal-plated tunics, chanting both victory odes and obscenities about the romantic conquests abroad. In their raillery Cleopatra’s name figured as a punch line, a charge that Caesar in no way denied. By tradition, the procession included the spoils of the campaign and representations of the vanquished; from the Campus Martius in the north to the Via Sacra, through the Circus Maximus and up the Capitoline Hill, rode effigies of Achillas and Pothinus, along with outsize paintings of the Nile and a model of the lighthouse of Alexandria. The crowds roared with approval. The Egyptian float was itself plated with glossy tortoiseshell, a material new to Rome and one that supported Caesar’s boasts about the riches he had acquired abroad. Each of the triumphs included feasts and public performances; athletic contests, stage plays, horse races, musical competitions, displays of wild animals, circus feats, and gladiatorial fights took place all over the city. For three weeks Rome was a thief’s paradise, as houses emptied for the spectacle. After the Egyptian triumph came a mock sea battle, for which an artificial lake was engineered. That match featured four thousand rowers and some of the defeated Egyptian ships, which Suetonius would have us believe Caesar towed across the Mediterranean for the occasion.
Certainly Cleopatra did not need to be on hand when Caesar assured the people of the bounties on which Rome might draw abroad, as good an explanation as any for his Egyptian interlude. They exulted in his largesse, which was properly hers. Caesar’s soldiers and officers made out handsomely. On every citizen Caesar also bestowed 400 sesterces—the equivalent of more than three months’ wages—along with gifts of wheat and olive oil. It is even less likely that Cleopatra would have wished to have been on hand for the Egyptian triumph, a reminder that she was not the only Ptolemaic woman in Rome. Each of the processions ended with a multitude of human captives. (So crucial were they that at an earlier triumph Pompey had appropriated prisoners that did not belong to him. Their number quantified a general’s success.) The more exotic the prisoner the better; Caesar’s African procession—the last of the performances of 46—included the five-year-old African prince who, in an odd twist of events, was to marry Cleopatra’s daughter.* In his Egyptian procession Caesar included another novelty, though one to which the Romans did not thrill as they did to the miniature African prince or the exotic “cameleopard.” Wrapped in golden shackles, Cleopatra’s teenaged sister, Arsinoe, rode through the streets. Behind her followed the spoils and the prisoners of the Egyptian campaign. Intended to impress, this unusual piece of booty instead disturbed the crowd. Arsinoe proved too much for her audience, unaccustomed, Dio tells us, to the sight of “a woman and once considered a queen, in chains—a spectacle which had never yet been seen, at least in Rome.” Awe curdled to compassion. Tears sprang to eyes. Arsinoe drove home the human cost of the war, which had affected nearly every family. Even if Cleopatra remained pitiless on her sister’s account, even if she preferred to read Caesar’s victory as one over a previous administration, she had little to gain from this brutal reminder of Egypt’s subjugation. She had narrowly escaped the same disgrace.
As it happened, glamorous guests were as problematic as glamorous prisoners. It is difficult to say which Ptolemy ultimately caused the Romans the greater discomfort: the royal prisoner whom Caesar degraded in the streets, or the foreign queen with whom he consorted at his villa. Soon enough Arsinoe would be banished, dispatched across the Aegean to the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, a gleaming, white marble wonder of the world. Her older sister spent the winter on the less fashionable side of the Tiber. She was without word from Alexandria, as the sailing season was over, to reopen only in March. She would be for some time too without Caesar, who left Rome abruptly, early in November. He was off to Spain, for a final campaign against the Pompeians. Cleopatra had known difficult postings before—the desert of the western Sinai comes most readily to mind—but for all the beauty of the Janiculum villa and its panoramic view, this one was less than comfortable. Her welcome was not universally cordial. Rome was chilly, and wet. Latin did not come easily to a Greek speaker; Cleopatra was at a linguistic disadvantage. And in a city where women enjoyed the same legal rights as infants or chickens, the posting called upon a whole new set of skills. For good reason 46 may have felt to Cleopatra like the longest year in history, as—on account of the attenuated calendar—indeed it was.