Cleopatra

By Stacy Schiff
At the outskirts of Rome a fragrant dusting of cassis, myrrh, and cinnamon hung in the air. Modest tombs and colossal mausoleums lined both sides of the road, as did shrines to Mercury, the patron saint of travelers. If they had not done so already, Caesar's representatives met Cleopatra outside the city walls and directed her, across a wooden bridge, to his large country estate, on the west bank of the Tiber. With assistance, Cleopatra settled on the southeastern part of the Janicu-lum Hill, a fine address if by no means as prestigious as those across town, on the opposite hill. In Caesar's villa she found herself sur-rounded by an extensive collection of painting and sculpture, a colon-naded court, and a mile-long, lushly planted garden, lavish by Roman standards, which to an Egyptian queen was fairly meaningless. By contrast she enjoyed a clear view of the city below. Through the pines and cypresses Cleopatra looked out over the yellowish Tiber to the outlying hills and the red-tile rooftops of Rome, a metropolis that consisted for the most part of a jumble of twisting lanes and densely packed tenements. Rome had recently overtaken Alexandria in popu-lation; in 46 it was home to nearly z million people. On all other levels it qualified as a provincial backwater. It was still the kind of place where a stray dog might deposit a human hand under the breakfast table, where an ox could burst into the dining room. As displacements went, this one was akin to sailing from the court of Versailles to eighteenth-century Philadelphia. In Alexandria, the glorious past Wa,: very much in evidence. Rome's glorious future was from Cleopatra quarters nowhere visible. It was just still possible to mistake which was the Old World and which the New. There is every indication that Cleopatra kept a low profile, low as she could keep under her unusual circumstances: "For she had come to the city with her husband and settled in Caesar's own house, so that he too derived an ill reputation on account of both of them," chides Dio. As everyone knew, Caesar lived in the center of town, near the Forum, with his wife, Calpurnia. Cleopatra's influence and that of her country were all the same much felt, directly and indi-rectly. On his return Caesar had begun to institute a number of reforms drawn from his Egyptian stay, during which he had evidently studied innovation as attentively as tradition. Most conspicuously, he went to work on the Roman calendar, which by 46 had crept three months ahead of the season. For some time a Roman year had con-sisted of 355 days, to which the authorities added an extra month irreg-ularly, when doing so suited their purposes. As Plutarch has it, "Only the priests could say the time, and they, at their pleasure, without giv-ing any notice, slipped in the intercalary month." The result was a thorough mess; at one juncture, Cicero did not know what year he was living in. Caesar adopted the Egyptian calendar of twelve thirty-day months, with an additional five-day period at the end of the year, subsequently deemed "the only intelligent calendar which ever existed in human history." He adopted as well the twelve-hour divi-sion between night and day that he had known in Alexandria. Gener-ally speaking, time was a vaguer, more elastic notion in Rome, where it was subject to perpetual debate.* Cleopatra's astronomers and math-ematicians assisted in Caesar's planning. The result was a bold correc-tion in .6, 4 the last year of muddled reckoning' and one of 445 days, the extra weeks inserted between November and December. The Egyptian episode had exerted a profound influence on Caesar; the only question in the eighteen months to come would be to what degree it had done so.
*As Seneca observed: "Easier for two philosophers to agree than two clocks."