Actually, the image of Cleopatra we have inherited was completely misleading, a creation of propaganda and nothing more. She was, if anything, a woman worthy of respect, not least for her intelligence, which went far beyond mere sexual cunning. She had only two recorded affairs with powerful and charismatic men, Caesar and Antony, and children by each, to whom she was devoted. The picture of her as a scheming nymphomaniac is false in every way.
But it certainly served Octavian’s purposes. He used it to whip up Roman plebeians and patricians alike to a war frenzy. In the first place, they feared that Cleopatra, through her influence on Antony, would subvert the proper course of Roman politics—and do even more damage if she moved to Rome with him. In the second, they loathed the idea of a woman, any woman, having such political influence.
Thus Octavian was sure of popular support for an attack on Antony which would destroy both him and Cleopatra. The eventual result was the sea battle between the Triumvirate’s ships and Antony’s, fought in 31 B.C.E., off Actium, south of Epirus in Greece. The sixty ships of Cleopatra and Antony were put to flight by the Roman navy; most surrendered. Cleopatra fled back to Alexandria; Antony, likewise. Both committed suicide, he by running onto his sword, and she—unable to bear the loss of her lover and the prospect of public humiliation in Rome, where Octavian was going to drag her through the streets for punishment—by the bite of an asp, the most famous snake in history.
Octavian went on to Egypt. He entered Alexandria on the first day of August, 31 B.C.E. There, he beheld the embalmed body of Alexander, his hero and model. It must have resolved him even further.
His enemies dead or scattered, his army and navy victorious, Caesar avenged, and the Roman people, weary of war, hoping only for order and an honorable, lasting peace, Octavian now had absolute power over Rome. “He was the first and the greatest and the common benefactor,” wrote Philo of Alexandria, “in that he displaced the rule of many and committed the ship of the commonwealth to be steered by a single pilot, himself.… The whole habitable world voted him no less than celestial honors. These are well attested by temples, gateways, vestibules, porticoes.… That he was never elated or puffed up by the vast honours given to him is clearly shown by the fact that he never wished anyone to address him as a god.” Instead, the Romans came up with a new name for him: no longer Octavian, but Augustus.
No such imperium as his had ever existed before. Rome now ruled the entire Mediterranean world.
The image we have of ancient Rome comes down to us in a very edited form. Much of the editing has been done by art and artists of later years: think of Nicolas Poussin. This city of the imagination, masquerading as a city of collective memory, is mostly white—the color of classical marble, the stuff we imagine the city made of. (So at the outset we are misled, since the marble most valued by Roman builders to sheathe the brick and concrete cores of their buildings was very often colored.) White cylinders of stone gleaming in the sun, surmounted by capitals, Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, Tuscan, Composite, linked by cornices, architraves, and arches. White ramps, white colonnades, flights of white steps, and white foam from the plashing fountains. White people inhabit this townscape, of course, and they are wearing white togas. There is lots of air around these dignified Romans. As befits the owners and rulers of the known world, which extended from England to Africa, from the Thames to the Nile, from the Seine to the Euphrates, they are not crowded or hurried. Their gestures are dignified; they have become the statues of themselves. They are full of that very Roman attribute gravitas.
If we were to pluck a real Roman from the real Rome of this time, the second century C.E., or from the earlier city of Augustus, and set him down in this handsome and meaningful place, this site of classical order, he might feel out of place.
The real Rome was Calcutta-on-the-Mediterranean—crowded, chaotic, and filthy. A few of its inhabitants might dwell in the palaces we imagine, but most lived in warrens—tall jerry-built tottering blocks of flats known as insulae or “islands,” which rose as high as six stories and were given to sudden collapse or outbreaks of fire. Building codes did not exist. The poet Juvenal complained, without exaggeration:
Here we have a city propped up for the most part by slats; for that is how the landlord patches up the crack in the old wall, bidding the tenants to sleep at ease under the ruin that hangs above their heads.
Because the insulae were usually built without chimneys, the tenants had to rely on charcoal braziers for warmth in winter, exposing them to death by carbon-monoxide poisoning or accidental fires. Rome had about 1,800 domus or single-family dwellings and 46,000 insulae, but there was no regulation of the size or human capacity of an “island”—it would hold as many people as a landlord could cram into it. If one thinks of a total population of 1.4 million people in Trajan’s Rome, one will probably not be far wrong.
This made Rome a vast and consequential city, but it also condemned most Romans to live in conditions worse than the overcrowding and lack of basic amenities—water, fresh air, sewage services—that typified the worst slums of New York at the height of immigration in the 1870s. “Terrarum dea gentiumque, Roma,” wrote the poet Martial, “Cui par est nihil et nihil secundum”—“Rome, goddess of lands and peoples, Whom nothing can equal and nothing even approach.”
But the goddess stank. These being long before the days of mechanical transport, Rome’s streets were laden with the excrement of horses, pigs, cows, dogs, donkeys, and people, ton on ton of it, not to mention the dead babies and the corpses from periodic murders and muggings, and all the kitchen waste. Few facilities existed for collecting and getting rid of this stuff, not even for dumping it in the Tiber. And the Tiber, one should remember, still served as a principal supply of drinking water for many Roman households. Not until the reign of the Emperor Trajan, in June 109 C.E., did the eight aqueducts which formed the distribution end of the Aqua Traiana, bringing more than 220 million gallons a day of good springwater to the right bank of the Tiber, open for use—and most of that was monopolized by the ground floors of the rich. Only very rarely did an insula have rising pipes to bring good water to its upper floors.
Nevertheless, ancient Rome did have one hygienic advantage over modern New York. Like most Roman cities, and unlike modern American ones, it was generously equipped with public toilets. These were not of the sort familiar to modern users. Because the ancient Romans did not have the same taboos about elimination as we do, they did not insist on separate cubicles. The typical arrangement was a long stone bench, pierced with suitable holes. Everyone sat companiably, side by side. Underneath ran a channel of flowing water; and a channel in the floor outside the seat enabled the users to wash their hands when they were finished.
Since municipal trash disposal was as far from Roman expectations as automobiles or video, householders simply threw their rubbish into the street, where it lay and festered and was sometimes partly washed away by rain. At least there were sewers and storm-water channels to carry it off into the Tiber. In fact, the Roman sewer system, which had been under construction since the sixth century B.C.E., was (for all its imperfections) one of the marvels of the world’s civic engineering.