Thanks to these oversights, Cleopatra is doomed to be remembered in Roman letters as a general’s whore, as a “book-monger” (as they term the mean female slaves here who assign work to even meaner slaves), or a cruel stepmother bent on murdering the previous sons of her husband — calumny stops at nothing! But it is too late now for these facile regrets. She should have thought twice before making such enemies. But even then she might have failed to win them over, not simply because of the loyalty of the poets to Rome and to Augustus, but because “who can tolerate a woman with all the virtues?”
I have taken so much time in getting back to her genuine voice that you may think I am dodging the issue. It isn’t so. And even if it were, I have a duty to gather my forces in order to recapture freely, without fear of the consequences, that rich, complex voice in all its nuances, before I take my final steps into the world beyond. And now here they are. The exact words of Cleopatra, as dictated to me in the last hours of her life:
On the Run
Damn the day I left my refuge with the pirate band in Cilicia! Damn the day I returned to Alexandria, those days when I studied and grew into a woman! Damn you too, Demetrius! I always respected you as my teacher, for it was you who initiated me into the mysteries of womanhood that made me what I was and what I was to become after my defeat. Damn you, because before I learned your lessons, I was invulnerable. At eleven years old, nothing could harm me. I was whole and entire, my own possession, untouched by knowledge. My life would have turned out better, if I had remained by the side of my pirates, if I had stayed as I was, if I had stopped my heart from learning the feelings of a woman. I wish I could start over on my journey to earth and remain there in beautiful Tarsus, living among but aloof from its sailors and warriors, defending myself against the knowledge of its sages. Damn those who brought me to this idiotic defeat! Damn myself for wanting to be queen of the world. Damn Rome! And above all, damn the legs of every Roman male, the handsome as well as the ugly, damn the lot of them! Note, Diomedes, this is the history of my time with the Cilician pirates, with whom I should have stayed, to whom I really belonged. This is the story of how I ran away to be with them, and I want to focus on that runaway child. I want the name of Cleopatra to be preserved in her, in that jewel case of vitality and joy.
That self-seeking tribune, Publius Clodius Pulcer! His nickname among gossipers was “the Sacrilegious.” At a ritual in honor of the Bona Dea, which only women were allowed to attend, at the time when Caesar was the urban proctor, Clodius dressed as a woman and slipped into the meeting, hoping to satisfy his lust for Caesar’s wife. He was detected but, thanks to a young slave girl called Habra, he escaped. Anyway, he used to claim, this glory-grabbing tribune, that he had made a proposal in the Senate to dole out wheat to the mob, legally and at no cost to them, with the idea of winning their adoration. The measure had no precedent. The economy of Rome could not support such a subsidy. So he came up with a shortcut to bolster Rome’s finances. He asked the Senate to approve the annexation of Cyprus. His main pretext, among a dozen others, was that King Ptolemy, the brother of Auletes, was in league with the pirates of Cilicia and was allowing them to use his territory as a sanctuary. “I have been a victim of the pirates of Cilicia,” he began his harangue (and here he was telling the truth, because years before they had ransacked some of his property). “I consider the repeated mockery from Cyprus to be an insult to Rome.” And so on. The Senate approved the measure, the army was dispatched, and Cyprus fell into Roman hands. Auletes did nothing to help his brother. The Egyptians, already resentful of their king because of his earlier concessions to Rome, exploded in rebellion. Before we knew it, my father was toppled from his throne and we had to flee in haste from Alexandria.
We arrived at Rhodes. There we found the virtuous Cato en route for Cyprus. Clodius had put the conservative Cato, his bitterest enemy, in personal charge of the annexation. He claimed Rome had no more honorable man, but he understood it was a splendid way to sideline Cato once and for all.
Cato treated us with contempt. He sent a message that he could not accept an invitation to visit us because he was suffering the effects of laxatives and that Auletes would have to visit him. When my father went to see him, Cato did not even rise from his seat. Even before my father could open his mouth, he called out in an unmannerly style, “What you need to do is turn round and get control of Egypt again. There is no point”—the stink had filled the room—“in your going on to Rome. Now, if you’ll permit me—” He crowned the unfinished sentence with a burst of flatulence.
Once the long fart had subsided, he gestured my father to leave. Worse still, he snapped his fingers to tell him to hurry. He had treated Auletes like a dog! Not much better was the treatment he gave my uncle. Disembarking at Cyprus, he offered to put the captured king in charge of the cult of Aphrodite in Paphos. My uncle was outraged at the proposal. A Ptolemy is descended from the gods himself; he cannot serve them as their submissive priest. He chose suicide.
How much honesty was in this spotless, virtuous, shitting Cato becomes clear when I tell you that his despatches to the Roman Senate were lost in transit. Some 7,000 talents in coin and metals, plates and dining utensils, jewels and exquisite tapestries from the Cypriot treasury, never made it to Rome. He alleged pirates had seized them. We shall see.
We left Rhodes and took up residence in Athens. There one of my maids had the misfortune to die. We carried out the funeral rites and left her buried in Athenian soil.
We had hardly arrived in Rome before Auletes was rushing around, stuffing presents into the hands of senators, consuls, and other notables. He had dreams of returning to Alexandria and regaining his throne. It now belonged, not to Cleopatra Tryphaena, but to his oldest daughter Berenice, after her mother had resigned for her own eccentric reasons. Other people’s pockets were bulging with his cash, while he was forced to move on to Ephesus.
By this time, I was twelve years old. I saw nothing I could clearly count on in my situation. Not that I wanted anything particular for myself; after all, I’d grown up used to instability. But I was stranded in Rome. I knew what I did not want to happen but I had no clear idea how to get what I did want. But I did come up with a plan. It was a guileless one, daringly imaginative in a childish way, and the members of the court supported it, without reservation.
I had fully resolved to leave Rome, where the moneylenders battened on my father, flattering him, offering to get him further loans, preying on his reserves, voraciously devouring the last of his riches, without the least interest in restoring him to his past greatness. My body now began to take on a woman’s lines and gave me the illusion that I was capable of controlling my own destiny, that I was the mistress of my fate. I could not get to Alexandria, nor did I want to. There the woman who bounced around on the throne with no concept of royal dignity would have had me put to death without a second thought, if I had shown up. She was still fiercely jealous of my mother, though my mother, in fact, detested me as much as she did. This was an open secret. And the source of many jokes throughout Egypt.