Was Cleopatra rolled up in a carpet?

A queen locked out of her own capital

In the autumn of 48 BC Egypt had two rulers who could not stand each other. Cleopatra, twenty-one, shared the throne with her brother Ptolemy XIII, a boy of about thirteen whose regents, led by the eunuch Pothinus, had driven her out. She was camped with an army near Pelusium, on Egypt’s eastern edge. Then Julius Caesar sailed into Alexandria on the trail of his beaten rival Pompey, only to be shown Pompey’s head: Ptolemy’s men had murdered him on the beach. Caesar stayed, and as consul of Rome he ordered king and queen to put their quarrel before him.

The problem was getting there. Her brother’s troops held the city around the palace where Caesar was lodged, and she could not hope to walk past them.

What Plutarch says

Plutarch, writing about a century and a half later, tells it in a few lines. Cleopatra took a single friend, Apollodorus the Sicilian, and boarded a small boat. They landed by the palace as darkness fell. Since there was no other way to get in unseen, she stretched out at full length inside a bedding sack, and Apollodorus tied it up with a cord and carried it indoors to Caesar (Caesar 49).

The Greek word is strōmatodesmon, from strōma, bedding, and desmos, a tie: a bag or bundle for carrying blankets and bedclothes on a journey. Nothing in it suggests a rug. Plutarch adds that this trick was what first captivated Caesar, because it showed her to be bold and saucy, and that once he had spent time with her he made peace between her and her brother, on terms of shared rule. Apollodorus appears nowhere else in ancient history.

The other versions

The other accounts have no sack at all. Caesar himself, in his Civil War, says nothing about how she arrived, or about the affair. Cassius Dio, writing in the third century, says she first pleaded through go-betweens, then asked to come in person, and entered the city by night without her brother’s knowledge, dressed to look both majestic and pitiable. The next morning, Dio says, young Ptolemy found her in the palace, rushed out to the crowd shouting that he had been betrayed and tore the diadem from his head (Roman History 42.34–35).

Historians cannot test Plutarch’s story either way. What every source agrees on is the result. Within a day Cleopatra had Caesar on her side, and soon the two of them were besieged together in the palace quarter, in a street war that set the harbor on fire (and perhaps the Library).

Where the carpet came from

From the theater. In George Bernard Shaw’s play Caesar and Cleopatra, written in 1898, Apollodorus turns up with a load of fine carpets, and the queen is carried to Caesar rolled inside one. The movies loved it. The 1945 film of Shaw’s play, with Vivien Leigh and Claude Rains, kept the scene, and in Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s Cleopatra of 1963 Elizabeth Taylor unrolls from a rug at the feet of Rex Harrison’s Caesar.

A rug makes a better picture than a bag of bedclothes, and it has stuck in documentaries, cartoons and school books ever since. The real trick needs no improving: a queen of twenty-one, shut out of her own capital, folded into a traveler’s bundle and carried past her enemies to the most powerful man in the world. Plutarch thought it was the start of everything that followed, including her son by Caesar.