Cleopatra neared the end of her training just as her father succumbed to a fatal illness, in 51. In a solemn ceremony before Egypt’s high priest, she and her brother ascended to the throne, probably late that spring. If the ceremony conformed to tradition, it took place in Memphis, Egypt’s spiritual capital, where a sphinx-lined causeway led through dunes of sand to the main temple, with its limestone panthers and lions, its Greek and Egyptian chapels, painted in glowing color and hung with brilliant banners. Amid clouds of incense Cleopatra was fitted with the serpent crowns of Upper and Lower Egypt by a priest in a long linen gown, a panther’s skin slung across his shoulder. She took her oath within the sanctuary, in Egyptian; only then was her diadem fitted into place. The new queen was eighteen, Ptolemy XIII eight years younger. Generally hers was a precocious age. Alexander the Great was a general at sixteen, master of the world at twenty. And as was observed later in connection with Cleopatra, “Some women are younger at seventy than most women at seventeen.”
How she fared is plain to see. The culture was oral. Cleopatra knew how to talk. Even her detractors gave her high marks for verbal dexterity. Her “sparkling eyes” are never mentioned without equal tribute to her eloquence and charisma. She was naturally suited to declaim, with a rich, velvety voice, a commanding presence, and gifts both for appraising and accommodating her audience. On that count she had advantages Caesar did not. As much as Alexandria belonged to the Greek world, it happened to be located in Africa. At the same time, it was in but not of Egypt. One journeyed between the two as today one journeys from Manhattan to America, though with a swap of languages in the ancient case. From the start Cleopatra was accustomed to playing to dual audiences. Her family ruled a country that even in the ancient world astonished with its antiquity. Its language was the oldest on record. That language was also formal and clumsy, with a particularly difficult script. (The script was demotic. Hieroglyphs were used purely for ceremonial occasions; even the literate could decipher them only in part. Cleopatra was unlikely to have been able to read them easily.) It made for a far more demanding assignment than Greek, by Cleopatra’s day the language of business and bureaucracy, and which came easily to an Egyptian speaker. While Egyptian speakers learned Greek, it was rare that anyone ventured in the opposite direction. To the punishing study of Egyptian, however, Cleopatra applied herself. She was allegedly the first and only Ptolemy to bother to learn the language of the 7 million people over whom she ruled.
The accomplishment paid off handsomely. Where previous Ptolemies had commanded armies through interpreters, Cleopatra communicated directly. For someone recruiting mercenaries among Syrians and Medians and Thracians that was a distinct advantage, as it was to anyone with imperial ambitions. It was an advantage as well closer to home, in a restive, ethnically diverse, cosmopolitan city, to which immigrants flocked from all over the Mediterranean. An Alexandrian contract could involve seven different nationalities. It was not unusual to see a Buddhist monk on the streets of the city, home to the largest community of Jews outside Judaea, a community that may have accounted for nearly a quarter of Alexandria’s population. Egypt’s profitable luxury trade was with India; lustrous silks, spices, ivory, and elephants traveled across the Red Sea and along caravan routes. There was ample reason why Cleopatra should have been particularly adept in the tongues of the coastal region. Plutarch gave her nine languages, including Hebrew and Troglodyte, an Ethiopian tongue that—if Herodotus can be believed—was “unlike that of any other people; it sounds like the screeching of bats.” Cleopatra’s rendition was evidently more mellifluous. “It was a pleasure merely to hear the sound of her voice,” notes Plutarch, “with which, like an instrument of many strings, she could pass from one language to another; so that there were few of the barbarian nations that she answered by an interpreter; to most of them she spoke herself.”
Plutarch is silent on the subject of Cleopatra’s Latin, the language of Rome, little spoken in Alexandria. Remarkable orators both, she and Caesar certainly communicated in a very similar Greek. But the linguistic divide spoke volumes about the bind in which Cleopatra now found herself, as it did about her legacy and her future. A generation earlier, a good Roman had avoided Greek wherever possible, going so far even as to feign ignorance. “The better one gets to know Greek,” went the wisdom, “the more a scoundrel one becomes.” It was the tongue of high art and low morals, the dialect of sex manuals, a language “with fingers of its own.” The Greeks covered all bases, noted a later scholar, “including some I should not care to explain in class.”* Caesar’s generation, which perfected its education in Greece or under Greek-speaking tutors, handled both languages with equal finesse, with Greek—by far the richer, the more nuanced, the more subtle, sweet, and obliging tongue—forever supplying the mot juste. From the time of Cleopatra’s birth, an educated Roman was a master of both. For a fleeting moment it seemed as if a Greek-speaking East and West might just be possible. Two decades later, Cleopatra would negotiate with Romans who were ill at ease in her language. She would play her last scene in Latin, which she certainly spoke with an accent.
An aesthete and a patron of the arts under whom Alexandria enjoyed the beginnings of an intellectual revival, Auletes saw to it that his daughter received a first-rate education. Cleopatra would continue the tradition, engaging a distinguished tutor for her own daughter. She was not alone in doing so. While girls were by no means universally educated, they headed off to schools, entered poetry competitions, became scholars. More than a few well-born first-century daughters—including those not being groomed for thrones—went far in their studies, if not all the way to rigorous rhetorical training. Pompey’s daughter had a fine tutor and recited Homer for her father. In his expert opinion, Cicero’s daughter was “extremely learned.” Brutus’s mother was equally well versed in her Latin and Greek poets. Alexandria had its share of female mathematicians, doctors, painters, and poets. This did not mean such women were above suspicion. As always, an educated woman was a dangerous woman. But she was less a source of discomfort in Egypt than elsewhere.* Pompey’s beautiful wife, Cornelia, only yards away when her husband’s head was hacked off at Pelusium—she had shrieked in horror—had a similar formation to Cleopatra’s. She was “highly educated, played well upon the lute, and understood geometry, and had been accustomed to listen with profit to lectures on philosophy; all this, too, without in any degree becoming unamiable or pretentious, as sometimes young women do when they pursue such studies.” The admiration was grudging, but it was admiration all the same. Of a Roman consul’s wife it was conceded, shortly after Cleopatra introduced herself to Caesar that fall, that for all her dangerous gifts “she was a woman of no mean endowments; she could write verses, bandy jests, and use language which was modest, or tender, or wanton; in fine, she possessed a high degree of wit and of charm.”
TO CAESAR, THEN, Cleopatra was in some ways profoundly familiar. She was also a living link to Alexander the Great, the exquisite product of a highly refined civilization, heir to a dazzling intellectual tradition. Alexandrians had been studying astronomy when Rome was little more than a village. What was reborn with the Renaissance was on many fronts the Alexandria that Cleopatra’s forebears had built. Somehow despite the years of savagery and the vacuous Macedonian cultural record, the Ptolemies established in Alexandria the greatest intellectual center of its time, one that had picked up where Athens had left off. When Ptolemy I had founded the library he had set out to gather every text in existence, to which end he made considerable progress. His gluttony for literature was such that he was said to have seized all texts arriving in the city, on occasion returning copies in their stead. (He also offered rewards for contributions. Spurious texts materialized in the Alexandrian collection as a result.) Ancient sources indicate that the great library included 500,000 scrolls, which would appear to be a hopeless exaggeration; 100,000 may be closer to the truth. In any event the collection dwarfed all prior libraries and included every volume written in Greek. Those texts were nowhere more accessible, or more neatly arranged—ordered alphabetically and by subject, they occupied individual cubbies—than in the great library of Alexandria.