CHAPTER 9
POLITICIANS ON THEIR WAY UP—or indeed on their way down—crowded the mansion where Cleopatra held court, hoping to persuade her to use her influence with Caesar on their behalf. To ingratiate themselves with her they had to force themselves to put aside their traditional Roman contempt for royalty and the luxury of the East. Cleopatra, however, seems to have felt sufficiently confident in her relationship with Caesar to see no need to solicit the support of important Romans. The Senate had soon dutifully and obediently ratified a treaty endorsing Cleopatra and her half brother as friends and allies of the Roman people.
The power and ability to snub were enjoyable for a proud woman whose father had been a laughingstock in Rome, forced to go cap in hand to moneylenders. Among those offended by Cleopatra’s hauteur was Cicero, who had not taken an active part in the civil war but remained one of the most influential conservative figures now that the fight was once more being fought with words, not swords. “I hate the Queen,” he later wrote in a letter to his friend Atticus. “Her arrogance, when she was living across the Tiber in the gardens . . . I cannot recall without profound bitterness.” Yet even he acknowledged her erudition. She offered to obtain him some books from Alexandria, causing him to reflect that, despite the scandalous stories circulating about her in Rome, “her promises were all things that had to do with learning, and not derogatory to my dignity, so I could have mentioned them even in a public speech.” If politicians incurred Cleopatra’s contempt, she was generous to singers and musicians for creating the sophisticated, cultured ambience she was used to and appreciated in Alexandria.
Whether Antony visited Cleopatra’s salon in the fragrant gardens along the Tiber is unknown. He had anyway recently remarried. Having thrown out the wife—his cousin Antonia—he suspected of cuckolding him with Dola-bella, he had wed Fulvia, widow of the murdered tribune Clodius, whose bloodstained body she had so astutely and theatrically revealed to the mob.
After Clodius, Fulvia had married Curio, who, like Clodius, Antony and Fulvia herself, had once been a member of Rome’s fast young set. According to Cicero and others, he had also once been Antony’s lover. “No boy bought for the sake of lust was ever so much in the power of his master as you were in Curio’s,” wrote Cicero of Antony. Yet Curio had been equally besotted and had even offered to stand surety for Antony’s huge debts. Desperate to end an affair that had become the scandal of Rome, Curio’s father, who had repeatedly had Antony thrown out of his house, on Cicero’s advice bought Antony off, settling his debts himself, provided that the two young men parted.
Curio had been killed fighting for Caesar in Africa. Antony seemed to Fulvia a suitable—and malleable—replacement. So ambitious that Plutarch described how “a private citizen was beneath her notice—she wanted to rule magistrates and give advice to generals,” she schooled Antony carefully, restrained his excesses and encouraged him to be more single-minded in his pursuit of power than was his natural wont. When, in later years, Cleopatra took Antony as her lover, she “owed Fulvia the fee for teaching Antony to submit to a woman, since she took him over after he had been tamed and trained from the outset to obey women.”
Though some hoped to profit personally from Cleopatra’s influence over Caesar, others pondered the implications of his infatuation with her. In particular they noted Caesar’s ambitious plans for the remodeling of Rome. Was he trying to fashion a new Alexandria on the Tiber?
Rome, unlike Alexandria, was an unplanned city, which had grown organically. At the time of Cleopatra’s visit it lacked the grandeur, grace and elegance of her own capital. Before the visitor reached the city itself, he passed the shantytowns where country people, lured to the city by free grain and constant amusements, had their dwellings. He also passed the great necropolises, where the ashes of the richer Romans were buried after their ceremonial cremations, since tradition prohibited burials within the city boundaries. Many of the necropolises were covered with graffiti either extolling or vilifying politicians. These crumbling tombs provided excellent cover for muggers and shelter for poor prostitutes, “those filthy sluts who conceal their trade in tombs.” The bodies of the poor were simply taken out of the city by night and tossed with all the other rubbish into huge pits near the Esquiline Gate. Here foraging animals, such as the wild gray wolves of Italy who reputedly suckled Romulus and Remus, disinterred them, gnawing the flesh and leaving piles of bones strewn along the roadside.
Rome itself was still built entirely on the east bank of the Tiber, but on the west bank were the premises of a mass of smoky, smelly industries banned from the city proper, partly because of their noxious fumes, partly because of the risk of fire. Among them were the making of matches, glassblowing and metalworking as well as tanning. The last relied on the copious use of human urine brought from the city in overflowing vats, which the tanners and fullers had positioned at convenient locations to attract those either too lazy to seek out the public toilets or too poor to pay the trifling fee they demanded.
After passing by the Campus Martius, the open space along the banks of the Tiber outside the walls that was used for large meetings and other public events, the visitor entered the city through one of the main gates in the walls. He was immediately confronted by a maze of rubbish-littered streets and alleys so narrow and winding that Caesar had introduced a law prohibiting wagons being driven along them during daytime; all porterage had to be on the backs of men or animals. If he needed to look for landmarks, perhaps on one of the seven hills, each between 100 and 150 feet high, around which everyone knew the city was constructed, the visitor’s line of sight was often blocked by the tenement buildings known as insulae or islands where most of Rome’s population, approaching a million people, lived. These five- or six-story tenement buildings cut off much of the sunlight from the narrow streets, usually had shops on the bottom floor, and were poorly and flimsily constructed, prone to fire and entirely without sanitation or running water. So many people simply emptied chamber pots from the upper stories on to the heads of passersby that a law had to be introduced regulating how much compensation those doused could claim. The wealthy Crassus had been one of the most unscrupulous developers of such tenements. Cicero still was. In a letter to Atticus he lamented that “two of my shops have collapsed and others are showing cracks so that even the mice moved elsewhere, to say nothing of the tenants.” But then he cheered up, reporting that he had “a building scheme underway which should turn this loss into a source of profit.”
Of the seven hills, the Capitol Hill was reserved for the gods and topped by the Temple of Jupiter. The smartest private addresses were on the Palatine Hill, where Cicero himself lived, though even here lack of space meant the gardens were small.* The Aventine Hill, opposite the Palatine, had a more mixed and bohemian population. In the broad valley between the two hills was the Circus Maximus—the oldest entertainment venue in Rome, supposedly first used for chariot racing in the time of the kings. Over the years, it acquired first wooden stands and then, in 329 BC, starting stalls for the chariots. Charioteers raced under the colors of factions such as the red or the white. Attendance could reach 250,000, still the largest crowd recorded at a sporting stadium. Circulating vendors kept the partisans well supplied with food and, in particular, drink. They roared each faction on and placed bets on the outcome.
The charioteer was a striking figure in his tunic in team colors, holding a long whip and a knife in his hand. The latter was used to cut the traces if he crashed, the only way he could save himself. Once the race started, he would lean out almost horizontally over his galloping horses. Four was the most common number but some races even involved chariots with ten horses. Races were over seven miles in distance and usually lasted a quarter of an hour. The trickiest moments were the tight turns, where the driver needed to seize the inside position, slow his team enough to make the turn and deny opponents any gap to squeeze through. Another of the driver’s skills was to crowd opposing chariots into one another in the hope of causing collisions, which were indeed frequent. There were rumors of charioteers being bribed to hold back their horses or of horses being doped by rivals. The races were particularly popular with the young since men and women were allowed to sit together and share the excitement, unlike in the theater and amphitheater, where they were segregated.
On the other side of the Palatine Hill, between it and the Capitol, was the Forum, the center of Rome’s political life, from where not only Rome but the whole of the Roman world was ruled. The Forum itself was paved with stone, was rectangular in shape and measured about 600 feet by 230 feet. Law cases were conducted outdoors in the Forum, whatever the weather. Although there was a Senate house, meetings of the Senate also took place in various of the buildings and temples grouped around the Forum and elsewhere. To the north was the assembly ground, where politicians addressed the people from a platform decorated with ships’ prows captured in a long-ago sea battle. The platform was given the name rostra, the plural of the Latin word for a ship’s prow.*
To the southeast, the dwellings of the Vestal Virgins and of the chief priest, the pontifex maximus, at this time Caesar himself, were close together near the Temple of Vesta. Nearby, too, was a remnant of the past nearly as old as the reed shepherd’s hut said to be the birthplace of Romulus and Remus and still preserved amid the opulence of the Palatine. This was the palace of Rome’s former kings. Increasingly dwarfed by the surrounding buildings, it housed the official archives and calendar.
To the east of the Forum, in a valley between three other of Rome’s hills, was Suburia, where the Julian clan had its ancestral home and where Caesar himself had been born. Suburia was now an entertainment district, succinctly summed up by the poet Martial as a “seething, wakeful and clamorous” place where “hot chickpeas cost just a small coin, just like sex.” Here young bloods ate at fast-food stalls selling goat stew, sausages and bass “caught between the Tiber’s two bridges.” (This was not a particularly sanitary location since this was where the city’s great sewer, the Cloaca Maxima—still visible to this day on the riverbank and big enough for a man and a cart to drive through—discharged into the Tiber.) Later, one of the many fast women leaning from windows or sitting in bars and brothels might catch their eye. Some of the least expensive and most practical worked from what one visitor called “an alcove with a price list.”
Caesar’s ambition was to change the face of Rome and create a city fit to be the capital of the world. He opened the first quarries at Carrara to produce marble for his projects and shipped in other materials from far and wide. His recollections of the broad, graceful thoroughfares of Alexandria lined with porticoes and statues undoubtedly influenced the plans he had been nurturing for some time. In particular, he planned to remodel the old Forum and create a grand new precinct in the very heart of Rome to be known as the Julian Forum.
Caesar’s new Forum was a long, open rectangle surrounded by porticoed colonnades and shops but, most significantly, at one of the short ends of the rectangle, Caesar constructed a temple to Venus the Mother (Genetrix), from whom he claimed divine descent. In making this dedication, he was fulfilling his vow to raise a sacred place to the goddess if she granted him victory over Pompey. However, near to the image of Venus herself, Caesar placed a magnificent gilt-bronze statue of his own living goddess—Cleopatra. Though the Ptolemies had long placed their images alongside their gods, in Rome such a step was unprecedented. That the honor had been given not to a Roman but to a foreigner and a woman caused shock, outrage and heightened speculation about Caesar’s intentions toward the Egyptian queen.
Caesar’s motives were probably mixed. He would have been mindful of the association of Venus with Isis and of Cleopatra’s claim to divine status as a reincarnation of the latter. Also, though there could have been no political imperative behind his placing of her statue in the temple and it did not change her official status, it allowed him to demonstrate to the people of Rome her importance to him personally as his lover and as the mother of his only son. This veneration of the child’s mother also seems clear confirmation that the child was indeed his, especially if recent research suggesting that the statue also incorporated a young Caesarion held on his mother’s shoulder is correct. A marble head of Cleopatra believed to date from between 40 and 30 and to be based on her statue in the Temple of Venus was discovered in the eighteenth century. Although the body on which the head is placed is not the original, indentations in the marble below Cleopatra’s left eye and just below the left corner of her mouth are consistent with where the fingers of Caesarion’s left hand would have rested had she been holding him on her right shoulder.*
As Suetonius recorded, Caesar wanted all his projects to be “the biggest.” He planned a huge new theater to eclipse that built by Pompey in 55 when, using riches acquired in his eastern campaigns, Pompey had raised a stone theater on the Campus Martius. By placing a temple on the western rim he had cleverly bypassed a law banning stone as a construction material for places of entertainment. The prohibition seemingly derived from the lofty view that secular theaters were immoral places invented by Greeks and, if to be tolerated in Rome, should be made of less permanent material such as wood. Pompey’s theater complex, then the biggest in the world, was more than a thousand feet long and seated some seventeen thousand. Its revolutionary design became a template for future theaters, including the Coliseum a hundred years later. Unlike previous theaters, which were based on Greek precedents and dug into hillsides, Pompey used the Roman invention of concrete. His theater was freestanding and set on a foundation of barrel vaults ideal for providing access to the auditorium and stage. The seats rose in tiers above the vaults. Behind the stage was a large colonnaded courtyard, inside one of the halls of which stood a statue of Pompey surrounded by representations of the fourteen nations he had conquered. This hall was sometimes used for meetings of the Senate and would be on the ides of March just two years later. Caesar intended to build his own theater just west of the Capitol itself and began purchasing and clearing land, tearing down existing houses and temples.
Some of Caesar’s works were clearly influenced by what he had seen in Cleopatra’s Egypt. In 46, a hundred years after the Romans had razed Corinth, Caesar decided to refound the city by disposing of some of Rome’s surplus population there. The Egyptians’ ability to build canals linking branches of the Nile delta and Lake Mareotis had so impressed Caesar that, as part of the Corinth project, he launched a search for a feasible route between the Ionian and Aegean seas. Centuries later this resulted in the Corinth canal. On Cleopatra’s advice, Caesar probably made use of Egyptian geographers in his schemes to improve the canal system around Rome and, indeed, to drain the nearby Pon-tine Marshes, a project abandoned at his death and not eventually achieved until Mussolini’s time.
Cleopatra’s presence in Rome and Caesar’s experiences in Egypt also had a profound intellectual impact on Roman society and culture. His admiration for the Library of Alexandria inspired Caesar to establish a great library of Rome that, by bringing together the whole of Greek and Roman literature and knowledge, would outdo Alexandria and make Rome the cultural as well as political center of the world. Unlike the canals, this project was completed shortly after Caesar’s death.
Caesar’s discussions with Cleopatra and the professors who studied in the Museon and the Library of Alexandria also inspired his reform of the calendar. The first of the great Alexandrian astronomers was Aristarchus. Around 270, using a modified sundial to determine the height and course of the sun and the angle at which the sun shone on the moon, he had deduced that the sun was far from the earth. He also postulated that the earth circled the sun—a theory rejected by earthcentric astronomers for another eighteen centuries.
A few decades later, another of Alexandria’s astronomers estimated the circumference of the earth within 250 miles and calculated within a tenth of a degree the tilting of the arc of the earth’s rotation that gives us our seasons. About eighty years before Caesar’s visit to Alexandria, Hipparchus, working in the Museon, produced a catalog of the stars, with estimates of the distances between them. By studying when solstices occurred over a period of years, he validated the general accuracy of the Egyptian calendar, which was based on the sun and divided the year into 365 days, and estimated the length of the solar year within six minutes of the true figure of 365 days, five hours and forty-nine minutes.
The Roman calendar, by contrast, had developed from a lunar calendar and counted years from Romulus’ founding of the city. The Romans had at frequent intervals added extra days into their calendar, which had 355 days (divided initially into ten but soon into twelve months), to try to bring their calendar back into line with the seasons, which, of course, derived from the progress of the sun. However, by 46 the Roman calendar had drifted more than two months ahead of the seasons.
Guided by Sosigenes, a celebrated astronomer from the Museon, whom Caesar may have met during his time in Alexandria in 48 and 47 and who had come to Rome either as part of Cleopatra’s entourage or at Caesar’s direct request, Caesar determined on a once-and-for-all adjustment to align the Roman calendar with the solar year. He therefore introduced a calendar that had 365 days divided into twelve months, as at present, with an extra day in February every fourth year to keep the calendar in balance. (Such a calendar had been introduced into Egypt by Ptolemy III in 238, but the addition of the extra day every fourth year had not always been adhered to.)
Caesar’s calendar made January rather than March the first month of the year, but he retained the old names of the months, which meant that several—such as September, October and November—contained the wrong numeral in their title. However, the Senate soon changed that of Quintullus, the month of Caesar’s birth, to Julius (July) in his honor. The Romans did not have the concept of weeks or weekends, and Caesar did not change the division of the month, which was defined by particular days such as the kalends, the first of the month (and the origin of our word calendar); the ides, which fell in the middle of the month, either on the thirteenth or fifteenth depending on whether the month was a long or a short one; and the nones, the ninth day before the ides. Other days did not have particular names but were positioned by reference to their being before or after the named days. Certain days were specified in the calendar as lucky and others as unlucky. The Roman day did have twenty-four hours, but only at the equinox was each hour of equal length. Daylight was divided into twelve hours and darkness into another twelve, so that the length of an hour of daylight (and of night) differed from month to month. To tell the time, people used public sundials and water clocks, these last adjusted to fit the current season of the year.
To get the calendar back on track, Caesar added two months to the year 46, making it 445 days long and what Caesar called “the last year of confusions.” Confusion there certainly was in relation to commercial contracts, and a Roman governor in Gaul increased the annual taxes due for that year because it had extra days. Conservatives or traditionalists disparaged the change, which was promulgated across the Roman world by edict, as they did any of Caesar’s reforms, on this occasion suggesting that Caesar was not content with ruling the earth but wanted to rule the stars. When told that a particular constellation would be visible next morning, Cicero commented sourly, “Yes, in accordance with Caesar’s edict.”
However, as would soon become clear, Caesar could control neither the heavens nor his own bright star. Despite all Caesar’s power he was still, as Cicero pointed out, “the slave of the times.”
*Our word palace derives from the grand buildings on the Palatine.
*The singular is rostrum, hence our English word.
*Today the marble head is in the Vatican Museum. Interestingly, a limestone statue of a woman of the Ptolemaic era holding a child on her shoulder in exactly this manner has been recovered from Aboukir Bay and is now on display in the National Museum of Alexandria.