CLEOPATRA HAD IN Rome the problem of any celebrity abroad: she knew few people, but everyone knew her. Her presence loomed large, only partly on account of Calpurnia, no stranger to such affronts. Caesar had married his third wife in 59 and spent the intervening years delivering up infidelities, from across town as ably as from abroad. He was himself never above suspicion. He had slept with most of his colleagues’ wives, in one case with both a very beautiful mother and her young daughter, whom he had the good taste to seduce sequentially. Between his departure from Alexandria and the return to Rome he had found time even for a dalliance with the wife of the king of Mauretania, an affair to which some—in a swoon of romantic logic—have ascribed Cleopatra’s visit. To compete with a wife was one thing. To compete with another Eastern sovereign, even one of lesser import, quite another. (This puts a more emotional spin on the matter than either the era or the evidence allows.) More problematic was Caesar’s marked affection for a woman who stood so far outside of, and on many fronts in opposition to, the mores of Rome.
While little about Cleopatra evoked affection abroad, all elicited curiosity. This would have imposed certain restrictions on her movements. It is difficult to believe she appeared often in unmannerly Rome. More likely Caesar visited her in his villa, which he could not have done discreetly. Ptolemies had been Roman houseguests before—Auletes had lodged with Pompey—but the relationship was dissimilar. It was next to impossible for either Caesar or Cleopatra to have done anything secretly; a curtained litter hurtled through the streets by a team of burly Syrians tended to attract attention. (Auletes had traveled about on the shoulders of eight men and with an escort of a hundred swordsmen. There is little reason to believe that his daughter interpreted pomp differently. Certainly she moved about Rome only with bodyguards, advisers, and attendants.) A great man did not travel without his scarlet cloak and retinue; by late 45, Caesar had moreover taken to parading about in red calf-high boots. And by all accounts Rome was a city in which the stones themselves seemed to talk. As Juvenal reminds us, a wealthy Roman deluded himself if he believed in secrets. “Even if his slaves keep quiet, his horses will talk and so will his dog and his doorposts and his marble floors.” You could take every possible precaution: “All the same, what the master does at the second cock-crow will be known to the nearest shopkeeper before dawn, along with all the fictions of the pastry cook, the head chefs, and the carvers.” Fortunately Cleopatra had little reason to cover her tracks. Nighttime escapades in canvas bags figured nowhere on her agenda.
Caesar made at least one very public attempt to integrate the queen of Egypt into Roman life. In September he dedicated an ornate temple in his Forum to Venus Genetrix, the goddess from whom he claimed descent and to whom he ascribed his victories, as well as the divine mother of the Roman people. Caesar was said to be “absolutely devoted” to Venus, eager to persuade his colleagues “that he had received from her a kind of bloom of youth,” no doubt all the more so as his cheeks hollowed, the skin pouched under his eyes, and his hairline vanished entirely. In his favorite temple, at what was essentially his business address, he installed a gold, life-size statue of Cleopatra beside Venus. It was a signal honor, the more so as Caesar had not yet erected a statue of himself. The tribute made some sense; to the Roman mind, Isis and Venus were, in their maternal roles, closely allied. As homages went, it was also excessive and perplexing, an unprecedented step beyond what was required of Caesar if Cleopatra had come, as Dio maintains, for official recognition “among the friends and allies of the Roman people.” That diplomatic formula mattered—it had been worth its weight in Auletes’ gold—but had not previously entailed costly statues of foreign monarchs at sacred addresses in the heart of Rome. It struck an odd chord in a city where humans did not traditionally mingle among cult images.
Cleopatra may or may not have fully grasped the irregularity of Caesar’s tribute; gold statues were not new to her. She would in his villa have acutely felt the oddities of the situation. The very palette of Rome was different. She was accustomed to ocean views, invigorating sea breezes, to sparkling white walls and a cloudless Alexandrian sky. There was no glinting turquoise Mediterranean out her window, no purple light at the end of the day. Nor was there any rapturous architecture. Rome was monochromatic next to the blaze of color to which Cleopatra was accustomed. All was wood and plaster. Music pervaded every aspect of Alexandrian life, where the flutes and lyres, rattles and drums, were everywhere. Only reluctantly did the Romans admit such frivolities to their culture. One apologized for one’s ability to dance or play the flute well. “No one dances while he is sober,” offered Cicero, the greatest of Roman killjoys, “unless he happens to be a lunatic.”*
If she spent any time in the thick of the city, Cleopatra found herself amid a gloomy welter of crooked, congested streets, with no main avenue and no central plan, among muddy pigs and soup vendors and artisans’ shops that tumbled out onto footways. By every measure a less salubrious city than Alexandria, Rome was squalid and shapeless, an oriental tangle of narrow, poorly ventilated streets and ceaseless, shutter-creaking commotion, perpetually in shadow, stiflingly hot in summer. Isolated though Cleopatra was on her wooded hill, there were advantages too in Caesar’s address. She was at a remove from the incessant hawking and haggling, the pounding of blacksmiths and the hammering of stonemasons, the rattling of chains and squeaking of hoists below. Rome was a city of nonstop construction, as homes collapsed or were torn down regularly. To ease the racket Caesar had curtailed daytime traffic in the streets, with the predictable result: “You have to be a very rich man to get sleep in Rome,” asserted Juvenal, who cursed the evening stampede, and felt he risked his life each time he set foot outside. To be trampled by litters or splattered with mud constituted peripheral dangers. Pedestrians routinely crumpled into hidden hollows. Every window represented a potential assault. Given the frequency with which pots propelled themselves from ledges, the smart man, warned Juvenal, went to dinner only after having made his will. Cleopatra had any number of reasons to yearn for what a Latin poet would later term her “superficially civilized country.”
At the time of her visit Rome had only just discovered urban design, another Eastern import. You would search in vain for the famous landmarks; the Coliseum, “the last word in amphitheatres,” had not yet been built. Nor were the Pantheon or the Baths of Caracalla. Pompey’s theater had been Rome’s only structure of distinction; it had inspired Caesar’s Forum, which now eclipsed it. Rome remained provincial, but increasingly aware of itself as such. Greece continued to spell culture, elegance, art. If you wanted a secretary, a doctor, an animal trainer, a craftsman, you wanted a Greek. And if you wanted a bookstore, you dearly hoped to find yourself in Alexandria. It was difficult to get a decent copy of anything in Rome, which nursed a healthy inferiority complex as a result. It manifested itself the time-honored way: The Roman waxed superior. His was hardly the first civilization merrily to impugn the one it aspired to be. So the pyramids—marvels of engineering and of ancient exactitude, constructed with primitive tools and equally primitive arithmetic—could be reduced to “idle and foolish ostentations of royal wealth.” Gulping down his envy with a bracing chaser of contempt, a Roman in Egypt found himself less awed than offended. He wrote off extravagance as detrimental to body and mind, sounding like no one so much as Mark Twain resisting the siren call of Europe. Staring an advanced civilization straight in the face, the Roman reduced it either to barbarism or decadence. He took refuge in the hard edges and right angles of his own language, even while—sniffing and scorning—he acknowledged it to be inferior to the sinuous, supple, all-accommodating Greek tongue. Latin kept its speaker on the straight and narrow. Regrettably, there was no word in that language for “not possessing.” But neither, blessedly, was there a Latin term for “gold-inlay utensils” or “engraved glasses from the warm Nile.”