Confident though she may have been, contemptuous though she may have appeared, Cleopatra left nothing in her preparations to chance. It was as if she knew she was playing not only to Mark Antony but far beyond him as well. Certainly she had heard of the elaborate scenes that had greeted Antony elsewhere. Incense and entertainment had followed him across the continent. In Ephesus the women of the town had met him dressed as bacchantes, the men as fauns and satyrs. Singing his Dionysian praises, they had led him into the city, full of ivy-wrapped wands, resonant with pipes and flutes and harps and shouts of acclaim. The invitations poured in; all Asia paid tribute and vied for his favor. From Dellius as from others, Cleopatra would have known she was entering a sort of sweepstakes for Antony’s attention. She seemed determined to conjure a display so stunning it would propel Plutarch to Shakespearean heights, as it would elicit from Shakespeare his richest poetry. And she succeeded. In the annals of indelible entrances—the wooden horse into Troy; Christ into Jerusalem; Benjamin Franklin into Philadelphia; Henry IV, Charles Lindbergh, Charles de Gaulle, into Paris; Howard Carter into King Tut’s tomb; the Beatles onto Ed Sullivan’s stage—Cleopatra’s alone lifts off the page in iridescent color, amid inexhaustible, expensive clouds of incense, a sensational, simultaneous assault on every sense. She must have made the seven-hundred-mile trip across the Mediterranean by naval galley, pausing for overnight stays, as she had earlier, along the coast of the Levant. At the mouth of the Cydnus sat a lagoon, in which Cleopatra likely transferred her entourage to a local barge, reconfigured and exquisitely decorated for the trip upriver, probably fewer than ten miles in antiquity. A fully manned galley would have traveled with 170 rowers; for her purposes, she may have eliminated as many as a third. An escort of supply ships followed behind. She traveled with an elaborate stage set. Often with Cleopatra there is but a slim convergence between the life and the legend. Tarsus is one of the rare points where the two fully overlap.
The queen of Egypt’s presence was always an occasion; Cleopatra saw to it that this was a special one. In a semiliterate world, the imagery mattered. She floated up the bright, crystalline river, through the plains, in a blinding explosion of color, sound, and smell. She had no need for magic arts and charms given her barge with gilded stern and soaring purple sails; this was not the way Romans traveled. As they dipped in and out of the water, silver oars glinted broadly in the sun. Their slap and clatter provided a rhythm section for the orchestra of flutes, pipes, and lyres assembled on deck. Had Cleopatra not already cemented her genius for stage management she did so now: “She herself reclined beneath a gold-spangled canopy, dressed as Venus in a painting, while beautiful young boys, like painted Cupids, stood at her sides and fanned her. Her fairest maids were likewise dressed as sea nymphs and graces, some steering at the rudder, some working at the ropes. Wondrous odors from countless incense-offerings diffused themselves along the river-banks.” She outdid even the Homeric inspiration.
Word traveled quickly, more quickly than did the fanciful, fragrant vision, which was surely the point. From the start of the journey a multitude assembled along the bank of the turquoise river to follow Cleopatra’s progress. As she floated toward Tarsus proper the city’s population ran out to await the remarkable sight. In the end Tarsus emptied entirely, so that Antony, who had been conducting business in the sweltering marketplace, found himself sitting quite alone on his tribune. To him Cleopatra sent word—as much a marvel of diplomatic craft as of cosmic staging—that Venus was arrived “to revel with Bacchus for the good of Asia.”
It was a very different approach from that of the girl in the hemp sack, though it yielded comparable results. There is no better proof that Cleopatra had the gift of languages and glided easily among them. As Plutarch notes, she was especially fluent in flattery. She manipulated its dialects like an expert: “Affecting the same pursuits, the same avocations, interests and manner of life, the flatterer gradually gets close to his victim, and rubs up against him so as to take on his coloring, until he gives him some hold and becomes docile and accustomed to his touch.” She could not better have calibrated her approach had she known her audience intimately. It is possible that she and Antony had met years earlier, when he had come to Alexandria on the mission that restored her father. (She had been thirteen at the time.) During Caesar’s Egyptian stay, Mark Antony had sent an agent to Alexandria on personal business. He was buying a farm from Caesar, a transaction of which Cleopatra may also have known. Very likely she and Antony had crossed paths in Rome, where they had plenty of business in common. His reputation was in any event familiar to her. She knew about his wild youth and his periodically messy adulthood. She knew him to be given to theater, if not melodrama. She knew him to be politically astute only on alternate days of the week, in equal measure ingenious and foolhardy, audacious and reckless. Certainly the spectacle of her arrival confirms that she knew of his tastes. She was among the few in the world who could indulge them. For all the travails of the previous years, she remained the richest person in the Mediterranean.
Antony replied to Cleopatra’s greeting with a dinner invitation. What happened next was revealing of both parties and the kind of behavior Cicero had deplored in each. Antony was a little too amenable, Cleopatra decidedly high-handed. It was the mark of status to give the first dinner; she insisted that he come to her, with whatever friends he desired. Such was the prerogative of her rank. From the start she seems to have meant to make a point. She did not answer summonses; she delivered them. “At once, then, wishing to display his complacency and friendly feelings, Antony obeyed, and went,” Plutarch manages to tell us, before finding himself so dazzled by the scene before him as to be—even in Greek—at a loss for words. Cleopatra’s preparations defied description. Antony thrilled especially to the elaborate constellations of lights she had strung through the tree branches overhead. They cast a gleaming lace of rectangles and circles over the sultry summer night, creating “a spectacle that has seldom been equaled for beauty.” It was a scene so stunning that Shakespeare deferred to Plutarch, who had already pulled out all the adjectival stops for him. Surely something curious is afoot when the greatest Elizabethan poet cribs from a straight-backed biographer.
Either that evening or on a subsequent one Cleopatra prepared twelve banquet rooms. She spread thirty-six couches with rich textiles. Behind them hung purple tapestries; embroidered with glimmering threads. She saw to it that her table was set with golden vessels, elaborately crafted and encrusted with gems. Under the circumstances, it seems likely that she, too, rose to the occasion and draped herself in jewels. Pearls aside, Egyptian taste ran to bright semiprecious stones—agate, lapis, amethyst, carnelian, garnet, malachite, topaz—set in gold pendants, sinuous, intricately worked bracelets, long, dangling earrings. On his arrival Antony gaped at the extraordinary display. Cleopatra smiled modestly. She had been in a hurry. She would do better next time. She then allowed “that all these objects were a gift for him, and invited him to come and dine with her again on the next day along with his friends and commanders.” At meal’s end she sent her guests off with everything they had admired: the textiles, the gem-studded tableware, and the couches as well.