Caesar and Cleopatra

Their love affair begins with a rug.

In the autumn of 48 BCE, Julius Caesar — fresh from destroying Pompey’s army at Pharsalus, now unambiguously the most powerful man in the world — occupied the royal palace at Alexandria. Egypt was in the middle of a civil war of its own: the boy-king Ptolemy XIII had driven his twenty-one-year-old sister and co-ruler, Cleopatra, out of the capital. Her partisans were scattered, the harbor was watched, and any recognized attempt to reach Caesar would have ended with her death.

So, as Plutarch tells it, she had herself rolled inside a bedding sack — tradition has upgraded it to a carpet, and the carpet is too good to surrender — and carried through the enemy lines and into the palace on the shoulder of a single loyal Sicilian named Apollodorus. The bundle was set down before the master of the world and unrolled, and out of it came the Queen of Egypt.

Caesar was fifty-two, a man who had seen everything the Mediterranean world could show him. Plutarch says he was captivated first by the sheer boldness of the stunt. He should have been; as an introduction, it has never been equaled. It told him everything about her at once — the courage, the theatrical instinct, the willingness to gamble her life on a single scene. By the next morning, the ancient sources agree, her cause was his.

We should pause on who she actually was, because Cleopatra VII is buried under two thousand years of propaganda, most of it Roman, most of it hostile. She was the last heir of the Ptolemies, the Macedonian Greek dynasty founded three centuries earlier when Alexander the Great’s empire was carved up by his generals and Ptolemy, perhaps the shrewdest of them, took Egypt. Her ancestors had ruled from Alexandria ever since, kings and queens of a civilization already three thousand years old when they arrived. The ancient writers are clear that her beauty was not, in itself, incomparable. Her power was conversation. Plutarch says her presence was irresistible, her voice akin to a many-stringed instrument, and that she turned from language to language with total ease — she was said to speak as many as nine, and she was the first Ptolemy in three hundred years who had bothered to learn Egyptian. She was also, by any measure, one of the most capable rulers of her age: fluent in the finance, grain politics, and naval logistics of the richest country in the Mediterranean.

The splendor of Egypt, three millennia deep, and the muscular energy of Rome ascendant met in these two people, in one palace, under siege. For that is what followed: the Alexandrian War, months of vicious street fighting in which Caesar, badly outnumbered, held the palace quarter and the harbor against the boy-king’s army. At one point he had to swim for his life, and it was during this fighting that fire spread from the burning ships to the shore and consumed warehouses of books — the beginning, in legend at least, of the destruction of the great Library of Alexandria, the memory-palace of the ancient world. History rarely offers so pointed an image: the world’s greatest collection of knowledge burning in the background while its two most formidable people fell in love.

They won. Ptolemy XIII drowned in the Nile, and Caesar restored Cleopatra to her throne. Then he did something extraordinary for the busiest man alive: he lingered. In the spring of 47 BCE, the two of them sailed up the Nile together in the royal barge, a floating palace, with four hundred ships in escort — part honeymoon, part imperial inspection tour, wholly a spectacle. Caesar the conqueror was, by every account, absolutely smitten. That summer, Cleopatra bore a son. The Alexandrians called him Caesarion — little Caesar. His father never formally acknowledged him, but he never denied him either.

Cleopatra came to Rome and was installed in Caesar’s villa across the Tiber, scandalizing everyone worth scandalizing. Caesar placed a gilded statue of her in the temple of Venus Genetrix — Venus the Ancestress, mother of his own clan — an honor without precedent, a Roman god’s pedestal for a foreign queen. It was as close as he could come to saying it publicly.

She was still in Rome on the Ides of March, 44 BCE, when the senators’ daggers ended it. There is no scene in her story more haunting to imagine than Cleopatra, in the stunned days afterward, packing to sail home — her protector murdered, her son’s future erased in an afternoon, the entire architecture of her world pulled down. She was twenty-five. A lesser person’s story would end there.

Hers, as we shall see, was barely getting started.

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In Their Own Words

Being at a loss how to get in undiscovered, she stretched herself at full length inside a bed-sack, and Apollodorus tied the sack up and carried it through the gates to Caesar’s apartment. This stratagem of hers, which showed a sort of boldness, is said first to have captivated Caesar.

— Plutarch, Life of Caesar, adapted from the Dryden-Clough translation (1859). Public domain.

For her beauty, as we are told, was in itself not altogether incomparable, nor such as to strike those who saw her; but converse with her had an irresistible charm... There was sweetness also in the tones of her voice; and her tongue, like an instrument of many strings, she could readily turn to whatever language she pleased.

— Plutarch, Life of Antony, translated by Bernadotte Perrin (1920). Public domain.

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