Cleopatra was fortunate in one respect. Caesar’s assailants had repeatedly stalled, “for they stood in awe of him, for all their hatred of him, and kept putting the matter off.” Had they acted when they originally intended, she might have been forced to remain in agitated Rome. She was in town for the furious thunderstorm that followed the funeral, and to see the comet that streaked through the sky every evening that week. From her villa she looked out over a city that was generally pitch-black at night but was now dotted with campfires, stoked until dawn, in the name of public order. And then she was gone, her baggage loaded on wagons and conveyed down the winding road of the Janiculum Hill, by way of a series of switchbacks, to the river and toward the coast. The sailing season was newly open; presumably with the help of Caesar’s adherents, she made a hasty departure. Within a month of the Ides she was off, her progress carefully tracked by Cicero, her fate much discussed in Rome. The talk died down only in mid-May. Cicero waited a few more weeks—by which time Cleopatra was certain to be back in Alexandria, and the coast absolutely clear—to vent his disdain. “I detest the queen,” he only then exploded, his blood reboiling, without deigning to refer to her by name, a distinction he reserved for enemies and ex-wives. It grated still that he had asked Cleopatra a favor, or that he had compromised himself in doing so, or that he had opened himself to ridicule. Given the turn of events, defaming her suited his purposes as it had not before. Even Cleopatra’s representatives felt his wrath, indicted for “general rascality” and impertinence. How had he exposed himself to such rough treatment from that crew? “They must think I have no spirit, or rather that I hardly have a spleen,” he raged.
For Cleopatra the departure may have been especially fraught. She had made good on her identification with Venus and Isis; in March she was pregnant again, presumably visibly so, as the secret was out. Cicero had ample reason to follow her closely. A pregnant Cleopatra was the trophy wife who could, at a precarious juncture, complicate Rome’s future. Unlike Caesarion, this second child had been conceived on Roman soil. All of Rome knew it to be Caesar’s. What if Cleopatra bore a boy, and chose to press her case? Cicero may have worried that she could derail the succession. She was perfectly positioned to do so. It was in any event to be a season of disappointments for Cleopatra, who either miscarried in the course of her flight home or lost the baby shortly thereafter. In Rome Cicero breathed a deep sigh of relief.
On another level Cleopatra was richly rewarded. All parties agreed that none of Caesar’s “regulations, favours, and gifts” was to be revoked. Cyprus was secure. Cleopatra would remain a friend and ally of Rome. For its part, that city braced for “an orgy of loot, arson, and massacre,” as for a likely reprise of the civil war. After the Ides a lively market opened for defamation and self-justification. There was a run on self-congratulation. Toppling kings was a Roman tradition too, which the conspirators believed they had valiantly upheld that gray spring morning. Even neutral parties happily contributed to the hostilities. As Dio notes, “There is a very large element which is anxious to see all those who have power at variance with one another, an element which consequently takes delight in their enmity and joins in plots against them.”
Inculcated from her earliest days with the fear that Rome might dismantle her country, Cleopatra looked on as Rome proceeded instead to demolish itself. It lurched through a dull, damp, dark year, one in which the sun refused to emerge, “never showing its ordinary radiance at its rising, and giving but a weak and feeble heat.” (The reason was probably the eruption of Mount Etna in Sicily, though—the contemporary curling irons at work—Rome preferred the political explanation closer to home.) She could only have been pleased to put an ocean between her and the turmoil. Probably she sailed from Puteoli, along the Italian coast, through the rough and inhospitable Strait of Messina, to find herself swept across the open Mediterranean, in April. The wind was at her back. The southbound crossing was an effortless one; an aggressive captain could make the trip in less than two weeks. Within a matter of days Cleopatra traded the persistent gloom and chilly air of Europe for the opulent warmth of Egypt. In sunny Alexandria she returned to the grind of public business and private audiences, to a round of rituals and ceremonies. She would never again set foot in Rome. Nor would she ever let that city out of her sights. She had played the game cannily and correctly, more effectively than any Ptolemy before her, only to find herself back at square one, blindsided by events, sabotaged by a wholesale revision of the rules. As a near contemporary marveled: “Who can adequately express his astonishment at the changes of fortune, and the mysterious vicissitudes in human affairs?” Cleopatra was twenty-six years old.
IN A LIFE of barely salvaged, emotionally overblown scenes, the 44 return to Alexandria is the one that got away, also the most opera-ready. No librettist has touched it, possibly because there is no text. For a woman who was to be celebrated for her masterly manipulation of Rome, Cleopatra’s story would be entrusted primarily to that city’s historians; she effectively ceases to exist without a Roman in the room. None stood at hand that spring as she sailed toward the red-tiled rooftops of Alexandria, around the flickering lighthouse and the colossal statues of earlier Cleopatras, through the stone breakwaters and into her calm, splendidly engineered harbor. When a foreign sovereign visited, the Egyptian fleet headed out to meet him; it surely did so in full force now. No matter how she had advertised her errand at home, no matter what her actual agenda abroad, Cleopatra could hardly have envisioned this dismal conclusion. She had had a few weeks to come to terms with events and to look ahead; whether she grieved personally or not, she had cause for apprehension. Not only was there no one to intervene on her behalf in Rome, but she had now inserted herself dangerously into the blood sport that was that city’s politics. As Caesar’s only son, Caesarion was her trump card. He was also a potential liability. She was if anything in greater danger than she had been in 48, when first she had found herself caught between two ambitious foreigners fighting to the death.
If Cleopatra knew the irritating nuisance of self-doubt, all evidence has been lost to history. What Plutarch described as her supreme confidence instead survives her, along with her superlative powers of persuasion. On a later occasion she would pass off a mission entirely botched as one expertly accomplished; it is difficult to believe that, having made her fragrant offerings on deck, she descended the gangplank in Alexandria—again a sovereign, safely returned to her admiring subjects—anything less than triumphantly.* She was free of rustic Rome, delivered from the swells of the waves and the turbulence abroad to a land that recognized her as a living goddess, every bit Venus’s equal, returned to a city where monarchy received its proper due, where a queen could hold her head high without being flailed for arrogance, where no one yelped over golden chairs or shuddered at the sight of diadems. She was, in short, back in civilization. That was particularly evident over an Egyptian summer, the season of celebrations. In its festivals too Cleopatra’s kingdom inverted the Roman order. With the fields under water, Egypt devoted itself to song, dance, and feasting. “Home is best,” went the Greek adage, and so it must have felt to Cleopatra, returning from a land that defined the word differently. “Alexandria,” Cicero had railed years earlier, “is home of all deceit and falsehood.”