They pretend to describe the real Cleopatra; they even believe their own pretence, but they end up reinforcing the version created by Caesar Augustus. (Cleopatra always called him “Octavius.”) They focus on one aspect of her, representing her as a creature who saw life through eyes blurred by her feelings. An insulting straitjacket for a woman of her energy, complexity, and violence. Could the great Cleopatra have been merely a tear-stained creature, weeping for her sentimental misfortunes? She had been educated by sages, constantly surrounded by refined and worldly eunuchs, by prudent and intelligent maidens. From childhood onward, she had witnessed palace intrigues. She had shone as a governor, excelled as a cunning strategist, and managed her affairs with consummate skill. Could she be this weepy weakling? Not anywhere on this planet called Earth. Nowhere where a man is called a man, a woman, a woman; courtiers, courtiers; youths, youths; slaves, slaves; soldiers, soldiers. Nowhere in the world of Cleopatra. She was of another order entirely. And I intend to portray her as such — even as I flee for my life, on horseback for my legs no longer support me — as a woman born to command, with the glance of a queen; a woman of method, order, skilled in languages and in seeing through pretences. Get away from me, all Romanness, Rome and its Romans. Away, I say! Far from where my hand is writing. Away, I tell you.
With this abjuration I need to begin before inscribing the words of Cleopatra, taking care not to alter them, in order to preserve the one thing she asked of me, her memory.
I wish to repeat what she began to dictate to me before the corpse of Mark Antony, covered in his fresh blood. She wore hardly a shred of clothing on her body. She had pulled off her clothes the night before, to cover him. Almost naked, she had spent the night in his arms, murmuring to him. We did not attempt to separate her from him, not even when his corpulent body stiffened and ceased to show signs of life.
Before day broke, before we shrugged off the sullen heaviness that had befallen us in place of the comforting sleep that carries whole and entire to realms where neither sadness nor joy can touch us, before we were fully awake and alert, Cleopatra sprang up, slipping out of the corpse’s embrace, where she had seemed part of its death, painted with blood and frozen into immobility.
She spoke to me, with her hair disheveled and matted. But she addressed me with an intelligent glance in her distraught face. She had abandoned all her attempts to chafe life back into Mark Antony and stood frozen. Her scanty garments had the look of sculpture, heavy, dense, and thick. They still retained a stiff charm in their folds but they no longer seemed to be woven of threads. The bloody fabric possessed an unearthly weight and volume.
Standing there, heavy as lead, with the proud carriage that always obliged us to adore her, as if she had dressed with an eye to elegance, adorned, as it were, for a ceremony of some importance, but with the blood always threatening to stream off her, she looked at me and began to speak, gesturing that she required my full attention. She ordered me to take her dictation and to take it accurately. I began to do so the second she opened her mouth, calmly and coolly jotting down her words, striving to preserve the precision and clarity of her thoughts. As is obvious, I have skipped some truths. My false memory, my slave’s memory, my Roman memory, wanted to imply that a certain madness raged in her words, out of control, as if she were beside herself with the grief induced by her farewell to her husband, to her sons, to Egypt itself, and along with Egypt, her farewell to autocracy, to power and riches, to beauty and all its charms, to life itself as it surrendered to the blind, insensate greed of Rome.
She wanted her story recorded. She was looking back to a world that she alone had known, one that could survive solely in her words. All the rest I have set down here, expressing it through her voice. The absurdities that I have attributed to Mark Antony, the feelings that verged on extremity, the recriminations, the tone, especially the hysterically vindictive tone, stripped of her characteristic self-possession — all that came from my stylus under pressure from Rome’s leader, determined as he was to destroy the memory of a great queen.
What is true is that Cleopatra’s voice retained its firm tone till the very last moment. Till then she remained in control of herself, a peerless creature who at no point succumbed to sudden fears and fits of anger, a woman who knew how to be beautifully persuasive. It was the voice of a queen and the silence of a woman, both of which I disfigured by distorting the way she spoke.
While she was attending to other business, using my secretaries and scribes, I was carefully checking the words she had dictated. I had noted them in own handwriting on the scrolls — less cramped than usual — the way I had done with her other narratives, decades before, along with her successful negotiations with neighboring sovereigns as she maneuvered to make stealthy additions to her realm, her plans for outright conquest, and her sensitive dealings to preserve and strengthen her domestic power. It fell to others to write down her financial dealings. That was never my job. Nor to record entitlements, the revoking of entitlements, and the other official decrees of this queen of kings. Still, all the royal scrolls were kept together, regardless of their content, and treasured as the principal legacy of Cleopatra to the world. To me, she dictated her thoughts about the art of government; her personal version, far from reliable, of the expedition against the Parthians, and a concise history in verse of the Lagids, which she stamped with a false signature. She had her maids compile a volume of tips on how to look beautiful, with hints on hairstyles, skin lotions, the starching of clothes, shaving kits and ointments, intended to be a present for any friendly king in whose territory the women were dismal frumps, so that they might acquire a touch of style. The scroll was scrupulously edited, but of course, it did not give away all her precious secrets. It was signed with Cleopatra’s name to add value to it, though it was common knowledge it had not been actually written by her. I must point out, once and for all, and before I forget, the total falsehood of a rumor circulating here and there, that Cleopatra wrote kitchen recipes, with ideas about how to decorate a room for a party, detailing the layout of the table, the reception area, the dresses and perfumes, with an addendum on mixing drinks and seasoning dishes and suggestions for the best songs and dances to accompany the occasion. That is a libel made against her out of malice, to reinforce the image of her that the Romans want to convey, of Cleopatra as a flirt, a mistress, a trivial housewife given to fits of pique. She has also been credited with a “Treatise on Weights and Measures,” another on agriculture, and yet another entitled “Secrets of Alchemy Revealed,” which contains a legend that she knew how to create gold. In one way that legend is a complete lie, but metaphorically it contains an element of truth, since her astuteness and versatility in business matters meant she had the knack of striking highly profitable deals.
Speaking of alchemy, she increased the riches of Egypt to an immense degree, multiplying them many times over, while hanging on to what she already possessed and preventing the Roman vandals from stealing any of it. She knew where to invest gold so that it brought in a one hundred percent profit. She bought groves of Jericho balsam, paying Antony a mere trifle for them, and then rented them out at 200 talents per year. In Nabatea, she cornered the market in pitch. When she could not exploit a thing for quick and easy profit, she put her ingenuity to work and eventually brought in gold in abundance. Gold poured into Egypt from all points of the compass. She even debased the coinage, minting coins that did not contain the legal amounts of precious metals, and inscribed on them whatever value suited her. Initially this caused an uproar, but then she flooded the market by minting even more of the same, plus others worth even less but all with the same face value. Confusion confounded confusion. She left her mark on the Roman world by this debasement of the currency. And in other ways, too. On her trip to Rome with Caesar, she took with her Sosigenes, the official astronomer of Egypt and, working together, they adjusted the calendar to make it coincide with the agricultural cycle. She worked tirelessly beside Caesar, organizing the census and showing him how to operate a customs and excise service. She applied herself to improving the appearance and the comforts of Rome, giving instructions to drain the Pontine marshes and Lake Pucinus. All without neglecting the affairs of Egypt, on which she kept the closest eye, despite her distance from home.