CLEOPATRA   Now, Iras, what think’st thou?

Thou, an Egyptian puppet shall be shown

In Rome, as well as I. Mechanic slaves

With greasy aprons, rules, and hammers shall

Uplift us to the view. In their thick breaths,

Rank of gross diet, shall we be enclouded,

And forced to drink their vapour.

IRAS                            The gods forbid!        (5.2.203-9)

Just the two of them, for a moment: now, Iras, what think’st thou? What do you reckon? But, even more, do you understand what this means? Have you thought this through properly, what capitulating to Caesar would really entail? So Cleopatra spells it out, vividly, with her customary attention to sensual experience, full of magnificent disdain, which partly masks a kind of terror. I’ll tell you what will happen, what will happen to you, as well as me. Thou, an Egyptian puppet—a plaything, a doll, exotic, made other—shall be shown in Rome, as well as I. You’ll be paraded too, put on display; you won’t escape notice. We’ll be manhandled, not merely shown off, jostled, touched, fondled—and we won’t be able to do anything about it—by mechanic slaves, the lowest of the low, working men! with greasy aprons, servants and labourers, with the tools of their trades like rules and hammers (which are also weapons, and implicitly phallic)—they’ll uplift us to the view, hoist us up to be gawped at. (Not Caesar’s disciplined soldiers, even—a rabble, a mob.) We won’t be able to do anything about it. In their thick breaths, rank of gross diet, shall we be enclouded, and forced to drink their vapour. We’ll be so close to them that we’ll be surrounded by their stinking breath, foul because of the disgusting things they eat; it’ll choke us, they’ll be that close, pressing in, in our faces. We won’t be able to get away.

Cleopatra’s class prejudice is strong and visceral—and her striking picture is an inversion of her own appearance on the barge at Cydnus, in a cloud of perfume so strong and overpowering that it hit the senses, overcoming everyone and everything. Her horrified imagining of being manhandled by the mob, uplifted to the view, is also a version of what she and her women did to Antony, lifting him up into the monument. She wants to avoid that fate, that precarious and potential travesty of transcendence.

The gods forbid! replies Iras, unsurprisingly. No way.