Even before she graduated to sentences, even before she learned to read, the love affair with Homer began. “Homer was not a man, but a god,” figured among the early penmanship lessons, as did the first cantos of the Iliad. No text more thoroughly penetrated Cleopatra’s world. In an age infatuated with history and calibrated in glory, Homer’s work was the Bible of the day. He was the “prince of literature”; his 15,693 lines provided the moral, political, historical, and religious context, the great deeds and the ruling principles, the intellectual atlas and moral compass. The educated man cited him, paraphrased him, alluded to him. It was entirely fair to say that children like Cleopatra were—as a near contemporary had it—“nursed in their learning by Homer, and swaddled in his verses.” Alexander the Great was believed to have slept always with a copy of Homer under his pillow; any cultivated Greek, Cleopatra included, could recite some part of the Iliad and the Odyssey by heart. The former was more popular in Cleopatra’s Egypt—it may have seemed a more pertinent tale for a turbulent time—but from an early age she would have known literarily what she at twenty-one discovered empirically: there were days you felt like waging war, and days when you just needed to go home.
On a primary level the indoctrination began with vocabulary lists, of gods, heroes, rivers. More sophisticated assignments followed. What song did the sirens sing? Was Penelope chaste? Who was Hector’s mother? The tangled genealogies of the gods would have posed little difficulty to a Ptolemaic princess, next to whose history theirs paled, and with whose theirs intersected; the border between the human and divine was fluid for Cleopatra. (The schoolroom lessons merged again with her personal history in the study of Alexander, the other preeminent classroom hero. Cleopatra would have known his story backward and forward, as she would have known every exploit of her Ptolemaic ancestors.) The early questions were formulaic, the brain fundamentally more retentive. Memorization was crucial. Which gods aid whom? What was Ulysses’s route? This was the kind of material with which Cleopatra’s head would have been stuffed; it passed for erudition in her day. And it would not have been easy to evade. The royal entourage included philosophers, rhetoricians, and mathematicians, at once mentors and servants, intellectual companions and trusted advisers.
While Homer set the gold standard, a vast catalogue of literature followed. Clearly the rollicking domestic dramas of Menander were a classroom favorite, though it is equally clear that the comic playwright was less read later. Cleopatra knew her Aesop’s fables, as she would have known her Herodotus and Thucydides. She read more poetry than prose, though it is possible she knew the texts we read today as Ecclesiastes and 1 Maccabees. Among playwrights Euripides was the established favorite, subtly suited to the times, with his stable of transgressive women who reliably supply the brains of the operation. She would have known various scenes by heart. Aeschylus and Sophocles, Hesiod, Pindar, and Sappho, would all have been familiar to Cleopatra and the clique of well-born girls at her side. As much for her as for Caesar, there was little regard for what was not Greek. She probably learned even her Egyptian history from three Greek texts. Some schooling in arithmetic, geometry, music, and astrology and astronomy (the last two largely indistinguishable) accompanied her literary studies—Cleopatra knew the difference between a star and a constellation, and she could likely strum a lyre—though all were subordinate to them. Even Euclid could not answer the student who had asked what precisely the use for geometry might be.
Cleopatra tackled none of those texts on her own. She read aloud, or was read to by teachers or servants. Silent reading was less common, in public or private. (A twenty-sheet-long scroll of papyrus was both unwieldy and fragile. Reading was very much a two-handed operation: you balanced the scroll in your right hand and rolled the used portion with your left.) Either a grammarian or a retinue of them worked with her on decoding her first sentences, a vexed assignment in a language transcribed without word breaks, punctuation, or paragraphs. For good reason, sight reading was considered an accomplishment, the more so as it was meant to be done with verve and expression, careful enunciation, and effective gestures. At thirteen or fourteen, Cleopatra graduated to the study of rhetoric or public speaking—along with philosophy, the greatest and most powerful art, as her brother’s tutor had amply demonstrated on Pompey’s arrival. Theodotus may at one time have been Cleopatra’s tutor as well. She would have had a dedicated tutor, most likely a eunuch.
The rhetoric master worked the real magic. Though less so for girls, Cleopatra’s was a speechifying culture, appreciative of the shapely argument, of the fine arts of persuasion and refutation. One declaimed with a codified vocabulary and an arsenal of gestures, in something of a cross between the laws of verse and those of parliamentary procedure. Cleopatra learned to marshal her thoughts precisely, express them artistically, deliver them gracefully. Content arguably took second place to delivery, “for,” noted Cicero, “as reason is the glory of man, so the lamp of reason is eloquence.” Head high, eyes bright, voice carefully modulated, she mastered the eulogy, the reproach, the comparison. In terse and vigorous language, summoning a wealth of anecdote and allusion, she would have learned to discourse on a host of thorny issues: Why is Cupid depicted as a winged boy with arrows? Is country or town life preferable? Does Providence govern the world? What would you say were you Medea, on the verge of slaughtering your children? The questions were the same everywhere although the answers may have varied. Some queries—“Is it fair to murder your mother if she has murdered your father?” for one—may have been handled differently in Cleopatra’s household than elsewhere. And despite the formulaic quality, history quickly crept into the exercises. Soon students would debate whether Caesar should have punished Theodotus, he of the dead-men-don’t-bite coinage. Was Pompey’s murder actually a gift to Caesar? What of the question of honor? Should Caesar have killed Ptolemy’s adviser to avenge Pompey, or would doing so suggest that Pompey had not deserved to die?* Would war with Egypt be wise at such a time?
These arguments were to be made with particular and exact choreography. Cleopatra was instructed as to where to breathe, pause, gesticulate, pick up her pace, lower or raise her voice. She was to stand erect. She was not to twiddle her thumbs. Assuming the raw material was not defective, it was the kind of education that could be guaranteed to produce a vivid, persuasive speaker, as well as to provide that speaker with ample opportunity to display her subtle mind and clever wit, in social settings as much as in judicial proceedings. “The art of speaking,” it was later said, “depends on much effort, continual study, varied kinds of exercise, long experience, profound wisdom, and unfailing strategic sense.” (It was elsewhere noted that this grueling course of study lent itself equally to the court, the stage, or the ravings of a lunatic.)