Cleopatra in Rome

Mack Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com

Cleopatra in Rome

In 46 B.C. Cleopatra and her entourage of sycophants and slaves journeyed to Rome to make obeisance to the new dominant world power and to claim a husband. Cleo had given birth to Julius’ son, but Julius went back to Rome to arrange things so he could be acclaimed king. He had a wife in Rome, Calpurnia, and Cal probably wasn’t really happy about sharing her husband with a Macedonian-Egyptian love-goddess, even for state reasons. Women are like that.

Cleopatra co-ruled with her little brother, who was also her husband. The Ptolemys were like that. She later had him murdered. The Ptolemys were like that. Indeed, Cleopatra had any number of her family murdered. Yes, the Ptolemys were like that. Ptolemy family reunions must have resembled Bagdad on one of its more festive evenings.

Meanwhile, back in the Senate, Cassius, Brutus, and other republicans did the Gensu thing to Julius, and so Cleo fled home to Egypt, where later she lived in domestic bliss for a while with Julius’ old pal Marc.

20th Century Fox’s 1963 film Cleopatra featured as its centerpiece Cleo’s entry into Rome with gazillions of slaves pulling the royal float in the form of a sphinx. Aboard were negligee-sort-of-clad girls adoring the putative incarnation of Isis, and servants and fan-wavers and security guards and lots of other of her folks putting on the Anubis for the Roman crowd. Cleo awed the Romans (but not Julius’s wife) with exotic displays, exotic dancers, and exotic animals, and her exotic self. This film scene alone was so expensive that it nearly put Fox into bankruptcy. Fox was financed by investors, however; the real thing over 2,000 years ago was financed by starving Egyptians suffering economic collapse and civil unrest back along the Nile.

Happily, in our more democratic time our elected leaders modestly regard themselves as mere mortals, equals among their fellow citizens. Our elected American leaders would never give offense to another nation by bringing along such a huge field-force that the trip would appear to be a colonial expedition among barbaric peoples in the shadows of the Hindu Kush rather than a state visit to a great and prosperous nation. Our leaders would never take the taxes of hard-working fellow-citizens in order to provide themselves and their retinues grotesquely expensive flying barges. Our leaders would never surround themselves with a Praetorian Guard for fear of their own fellow-citizens. Our of-the-people leaders, certainly our Congress, would never even dream of, say, appropriating military aircraft for the privileged use of themselves and their families.

No, no American would ever play the Romanov, the Ptolemy, or the Hohenzollern (say that five times really quickly).

As Alexander Hamilton said during a debate, “Here, sir, the people govern.” And, by cracky, he was right.

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