With the possible exception of Calpurnia, to whom the mutilated corpse was delivered, it is unlikely that the news affected anyone as profoundly as Cleopatra. No matter how it registered on a personal level, Caesar’s death represented a catastrophic political blow. She had lost her champion. Her situation was now insecure at best. The anxiety was great. Were his friends and relatives also to be murdered? Certainly Mark Antony—by rank the next in command—assumed so. Disguised as a servant, he went into hiding. When he resurfaced it was with a breastplate under his tunic. Those involved in the attack changed their clothes and vanished, as did their defenders. (Cicero approved of the murder but played no part in it. He fled as well.) Given Caesar’s anticipated departure, Cleopatra may well have been on the verge of leaving Rome by mid-March. She could by no means have anticipated this finale, however. For years there had been whispers of conspiracies against Caesar, talk that well predated her stay. As for the catalogue of portents, they are impeccable only in retrospect. They might at the time have added up to any number of futures; ancient history is oddly short on incorrect omens. Only later were the unmistakable signs fitted to the occasion, compiled by men who happened to believe Caesar’s murder as much justified as preordained.
The explanations similarly piled up later, history being a kind of omen-in-reverse enterprise. As they did so, Cleopatra began to assume a role in the murder. Her presence in Rome demanded an explanation and it got one. She resolved certain mysteries, corralled the stray motives and rogue details of Caesar’s story. There was for starters the stubborn problem of the Alexandrian stay. Whether a tribute to Cleopatra’s influence or her ambitions, it had to mean something. And what was the significance of her gilded image in the Forum, at Venus’s side? Idle tongues and poison pens were in great supply after March 15, when there was much accounting to do, when it became more and more clear that Caesar’s assassins had no set plan for the future and that Rome had suffered a terrible loss. Significantly, the person most likely to have incriminated Cleopatra does not: She figures nowhere on Cicero’s long list of Caesar’s missteps and offenses. In addressing a mournful Rome, Cicero invoked the destruction wrought by Helen of Troy, but he was speaking of Antony rather than Cleopatra.
Caesar had over the previous months evidenced an immoderate taste for extravagant, unprecedented honors. There had been much provocative playacting with diadems, an accessory from which any good Roman recoiled. Whether this was planned by Caesar or inflicted on him is unclear. It seems the first to offer those honors were also the first to condemn, that with each tribute Caesar’s colleagues prepared for him a sort of ambush, “because they wished to make him envied and hated as quickly as possible, that he might the sooner perish.” Caesar stood supreme; at least in retrospect, it seemed logical that he wanted to be a god in his country as Cleopatra was a goddess in hers. Soon it was bandied about that a law had been in the works “permitting him to have intercourse with as many women as he pleased.” (Suetonius cleaned this up, noting that Caesar was to be allowed to marry many wives “for the purpose of begetting children.”) He was to be allowed not only to have several wives but to wed his foreign mistress, not then possible under the law, which recognized only marriages between Romans. Caesar was said to have intended as well to transfer the capital of the empire to Alexandria. He was intent on “taking with him the resources of the state, draining Italy by levies, and leaving the charge of the city to his friends.” That account made sense not only of Cleopatra, but of the implicit insult that could be read into her lover’s architectural ambitions, his manic refashioning of Rome. The two Caesars—before Egypt and after Spain—were incompatible, and incomprehensibly so; Cleopatra supplied a neat dividing line. She could be said to explain his obsession with power and titles in the last five months of his life, the royal trappings and divine cravings, the wayward crowns and the oddly autocratic demeanor. By our century, she had come to have conspired in the diadem-distributing charades. She planted the absolutist ideal in Caesar’s mind and was poised to become empress of Rome. She exercised a decisive, corrupting influence on the Roman leader, to the extent that a new Caesar was born in Egypt—and to the extent that Cleopatra properly qualified as the founder of the Roman Empire.
Certainly Cleopatra contributed to Caesar’s downfall, although there is no evidence of imperial design on her part or on his, no treachery, or for that matter, any blinding, fatal passion. How much of a role she played is debatable. For all her persuasive talents, she was unlikely to have been much involved in domestic politics in any meaningful way. Were she and Caesar considering a joint monarchy? Possibly, but no evidence remains. Sometimes a business trip is just a business trip. Suetonius recognized the lot of the unadorned historical account, destined to be improved upon by “silly folk, who will try to use the curling-irons on his narrative.” The polymathic Nicolaus of Damascus, who tutored Cleopatra’s children, was the first to implicate Cleopatra. A century later Lucan was happy to follow that lead, neatly rolling her dual offenses against Caesar into a single line: “She aroused his greed.” Those assertions made for a better narrative than did the plain fact that Caesar had plenty of enemies for plenty of reasons, few of which had anything to do with either Egyptian queens or the Roman constitution. Even the reworking of the calendar had earned him enmity, as he had inadvertently curtailed the appointments of men in power. Those who had reason to be grateful to Caesar resented their debts. Others agonized over wartime losses. Some hoped only to upset the system. “And so,” conceded one contemporary, “every kind of man combined against him: great and small, friend and foe, military and political, every one of whom put forward his own particular pretext for the matter at hand, and as a result of his own complaints each lent a ready ear to the accusations of the others.”
On March 17 Caesar’s will was unsealed and read aloud at Mark Antony’s home, the large villa that had once been Pompey’s, and to which Antony had returned. Although Cleopatra had been in Rome in mid-September when Caesar composed that document, she figured nowhere in it. If she was disappointed she was not alone: It supported none of the nefarious motives attributed to Caesar. Rather the will read as one long rebuke to his assassins. He left the villa and grounds on which Cleopatra lived to the people of Rome. He bequeathed 75 drachmas to every adult Roman male in the city. He could not legally bequeath money to a foreigner and did not; he was hardly as tone-deaf as he had appeared in his last months. He made no provision for or acknowledgment of Caesarion. In a move that startled everyone, he made no provision either for Mark Antony, who had patently expected otherwise. Instead Caesar named Gaius Octavian, his eighteen-year-old grandnephew, as his heir. Formally adopting the boy, he granted him three fourths of his fortune, and—more valuably—his name. Antony was appointed Octavian’s guardian, along with several of Caesar’s close associates, who happened also to be his assassins.
Some believed business in Rome would simply continue as usual after the Ides. They did not count on Antony’s gift for spectacle. Three days later the city erupted in riots when Caesar’s funeral turned into a savage hunt for his murderers. Over the body, laid out, with its gaping wounds, on an ivory couch, Antony delivered a stirring oration. He was unshaved, a sign of mourning. On the Senate speakers’ platform he hitched up his robes so as to free both hands. A “proud and thunderous expression” fixed on his face, Antony chanted Caesar’s praises and catalogued his victories. It was at this time that he defended Caesar from charges of having delayed in Egypt out of voluptuousness. Effectively alternating his tone “from clarion-clear to dirge-like,” Antony delivered up a potent cocktail of pity and indignation. Never one to resist a flourish, he went on to display Caesar’s bloodied gray head. He then rather unhelpfully stripped the shredded, blood-stiffened clothes from the body and waved them about on a spear. The crowd went wild, indulging in a spur-of-the-moment cremation and destroying the hall in which Caesar had been killed. A frenzied spree of murder and arson followed, during which, as Cicero had it, “almost the whole city was burned down and once more great numbers were slaughtered.” Rome was very much unsafe for Cleopatra, or for that matter anyone. All the qualities the Romans attributed to the Alexandrians—those fanatical, intemperate, bloodthirsty barbarians—were on vivid display. In the marketplace a man wrongly understood to be an assassin was torn limb from limb.