THE DEAD ENDS and missing pieces in Cleopatra’s story have worked a paradoxical effect; they have kept us relentlessly coming back for more. To centuries of literature on the last queen of Egypt add a recent surge in fine Hellenistic scholarship; a catalogue of the secondary sources would easily amount to a fat volume of its own. I have opted not to write it. Where much material has been distilled into little, chapter headnotes indicate central texts. Volumes that have shaped the narrative as a whole—the ones I have pulled most frequently from the shelf—appear in the selected bibliography. Those texts are cited here by author’s last name and publication date. Primary sources and periodicals appear exclusively below. Footnotes offer an occasional elaboration on a theme.
Translations of the Greek or Latin are from the Loeb Classical Library unless noted and with three general exceptions: For Appian and for Caesar’s Civil War I have used John Carter’s fluid translations (Penguin, 1996, and Oxford, 1998, respectively). For Lucan I have drawn from Susan H. Braund’s 2008 Oxford University Press edition. Where translations differ markedly from published texts I am grateful to Inger Kuin, who untangled awkward phrasings and reconciled contradictory ones. Cleopatra VII, Julius Caesar, and Mark Antony are abbreviated as C, CR, and A. Names of principal sources are rendered as follows:
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Appian |
Appian, The Civil Wars |
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Athenaeus |
Athenaeus, The Learned Banqueters |
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AA |
Augustus, Res Gestae Divi Augustus (The Acts of Augustus) |
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AW |
Caesar, Alexandrian War |
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CW |
Caesar, The Civil War |
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Cicero |
Cicero’s letters |
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Dio |
Dio Cassius, Roman History |
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Diodorus |
Diodorus of Sicily, Library of History |
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Florus |
Florus, Epitome of Roman History |
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JA |
Josephus, Jewish Antiquities |
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JW |
Josephus, The Jewish War |
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Lucan |
Lucan, Civil War |
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ND |
Nicolaus of Damascus, Life of Augustus |
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Pausanias |
Pausanias, Description of Greece |
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NH |
Pliny, Natural History |
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Flatterer |
Plutarch, “How to Tell a Flatterer from a Friend,” Moralia |
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MA |
Plutarch, Lives, “Antony” |
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JC |
Plutarch, Lives, “Caesar” |
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Pompey |
Plutarch, Lives, “Pompey” |
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Quintilian |
Quintilian, The Orator’s Education |
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Strabo |
Strabo, Geography |
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DA |
Suetonius, The Deified Augustus (Lives of the Caesars) |
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DJ |
Suetonius, The Deified Julius (Lives of the Caesars) |
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Valerius |
Valerius Maximus, Memorable Doings and Sayings |
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VP |
Velleius Paterculus, Compendium of Roman History |
CHAPTER I: THAT EGYPTIAN WOMAN
1. “That Egyptian woman”: Florus, II.xxi.11. Translation from Ashton, 2008, 2.
2. “Man’s most valuable”: From Euripides’ “Helen,” in Euripides II: The Cyclops, Heracles, Iphigenia in Tauris, Helen, David Grene and Richmond Lattimore, eds.; Richmond Lattimore, tr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959), 1615.
3. greater prestige: JA, XV.l0l.
4. “either destroy everything”: Sallust, “Letter of Mithradates,” 21.
5. A Roman historian: JA, XIII.408 vs. XIII.430.
6. marriage contract: Rowlandson, 1998, 322.
7. “by being scrupulously chaste”: Dio, LVIII.ii.5.
8. “natural talent for deception”: Cicero to Quintus, 2 (I.2), c. November 59. Cicero had no taste for the “whole tribe” of easterners: “On the contrary I am sick and tired of their fribbling, fawning ways and their minds always fixed on present advantage, never on the right thing to do.”
9. “a loose girl of sixteen”: James Anthony Froude, Caesar: A Sketch (New York: Scribner’s, 1879), 446.
10. “odious extravagance”: Pompey, 24.
11. The historical methods: Writing a good 130 years after C, Josephus attacked the veracity and the methods of his contemporaries: “We have actually had so-called histories even of our recent war published by persons who never visited the sites nor were anywhere near the actions described, but, having put together a few hearsay reports, have, with the gross impudence of drunken revelers, miscalled their productions by the name of history” (Against Apion, I.46). He simultaneously maligned the ancient Greeks for offering contradictory accounts of the same events—after which he proceeded to do so himself.
12. The reliance on memory: The point is K. R. Bradley’s, introduction to Suetonius, Lives of the Caesars I, 14.
13. no plain, unvarnished stories: Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, Suetonius (London: Bristol Classical Press, 2004), 19. See also Fergus Millar, A Study of Cassius Dio (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 28. On the practice of extracting brilliant history from “next to nothing,” T. P. Wiseman, Clio’s Cosmetics: Three Studies in Greco-Roman Literature (Bristol: Bristol Phoenix Press, 1979), 23–53. See also Josephus, Against Apion, I.24–5. All illuminate Quintilian’s first-century AD point: “History is very near to poetry, and may be considered in some sense as poetry in prose.”
14. “the most unfortunate of fathers”: JW, I.556.
15. Hellenistic Age defined: “The Greek world with the Greeks taken out,” Daniel Ogden, The Hellenistic World: New Perspectives (London: Duckworth, 2002), x.
16. “And the endeavor”: Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, I, XXII.4–XXIII.3.
CHAPTER II: DEAD MEN DON’T BITE
On the “strange madness” (Cicero to Tiro, 146 [XVI.12], January 27, 49) of the Roman civil wars: Appian, JC, Dio, Florus, Plutarch. Suetonius provides the portrait of CR. For a different view of C’s removal from power, Cecilia M. Peek, “The Expulsion of Cleopatra VII,” Ancient Society 38 (2008): 103–35. Peek argues that C was removed only in the spring of 48.
Among the classical sources on Alexandria, I have leaned most heavily on Achilles Tatius, Ammianus Marcellinus, Arrian, Diodorus, Pliny, Plutarch, Polybius, Strabo, Theocritus, and Philo, especially “On the Contemplative Life,” “On Dreams, Book 2,” “On the Embassy to Gaius.” Josephus provides descriptions of Herod’s temple and palace in JW, V.173–225; C’s could only have been more opulent. Athenaeus, V. 195–7 offers details on the fittings. I have taken Lucan and Aristeas’s palatial descriptions with a grain of salt. Among modern reconstructions: Inge Nielsen, Hellenistic Palaces: Tradition and Renewal (Aarhus, Denmark: Aarhus University Press, 1999); and Maria Nowicka, La maison privée dans l’Egypte ptolémaïque (Wroclaw, Poland: Wydawnictwo Polskiej Akademii Nauk, 1969).
For modern accounts of Alexandria: Pascale Ballet’s very good La vie quotidienne à Alexandrie (Paris: Hachette, 1999); Diana Delia, “The Population of Roman Alexandria,” Transactions of the American Philological Association 118 (1988): 275–292; Jean-Yves Empereur, Alexandria: Jewel of Egypt (New York: Abrams, 2002); E. M. Forster, Alexandria: A History and a Guide (London: André Deutsch, 2004); Franck Goddio, Alexandria: The Submerged Royal Quarters (London: Periplus, 1998); William LaRiche, Alexandria: The Sunken City (London: Weidenfeld, 1996); John Marlowe’s exquisite The Golden Age of Alexandria (London: Gollancz, 1971); Alexandria and Alexandrianism, papers delivered at J. Paul Getty, April 22–5, 1993, Symposium (Malibu: The J. Paul Getty Museum, 1996); Justin Pollard and Howard Reid, The Rise and Fall of Alexandria: Birthplace of the Modern Mind (New York: Viking, 2006); J. Pollitt, Art in the Hellenistic Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Paul Edmund Stanwick, Portraits of the Ptolemies: Greek Kings as Egyptian Pharaohs (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002); Theodore Vrettos, Alexandria: City of the Western Mind (New York: Free Press, 2001). On the city plan itself, W. A. Daszweski, “Notes on Topography of Ptolemaic Alexandria,” Mieczysław Rodziewicz, “Ptolemaic Street Directions in Basilea (Alexandria),” and Richard Tomlinson, “The Town Plan of Hellenistic Alexandria,” in Alessandria e il Mondo Ellenistico-Romano (Rome: L’Erma di Bretschneider, 1995); and Barbara Tkaczow’s illuminating The Topography of Ancient Alexandria (Warsaw: Travaux du Centre d’Archéologie Méditerranéenne, 1993).
On education, to Aristotle “an ornament in prosperity and a refuge in adversity”: Cicero, in particular Brutus and On the Orator; Seneca, Epistulae Morales, II; Suetonius, “On Grammarians” and “On Rhetoricians”; Quintilian, “Exercises”; Lucian, “Salaried Posts in Great Houses.” On the subjects for composition, Quintilian, III.8.48–70 and Seneca, Epistulae Morales, LXXXVIII.6–9. Among modern sources: Stanley F. Bonner, Education in Ancient Rome (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977); Alan K. Bowman and Greg Woolf, eds., Literacy and Power in the Ancient World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); M. L. Clarke, who is especially good on the rhetorical assignments, Higher Education in the Ancient World (London: Routledge, 1971); Raffaella Cribiore’s excellent work, in particular Gymnastics of the Mind(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Bernard Legras, “L’enseignement de l’histoire dans les écoles grecques d’Egypte,” in Akten des 21. Internationalen Papyrologenkongresses, Berlin 1995 (Stuttgart: Teubner, 1997), 586–600; H. I. Marrou’s superb A History of Education in Antiquity (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1956); Teresa Morgan, Literate Education in the Hellenistic and Roman Worlds (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Rawson, 1985.
On the Ptolemaic marriages and intermarriages: Chris Bennett, “Cleopatra V Tryphaena and the Genealogy of the Later Ptolemies,” Ancient Society 28 (1997): 39–66; Elizabeth Carney, “The Reappearance of Royal Sibling Marriage in Ptolemaic Egypt,” La Parola del Passato XLII (1987): 420–39; Keith Hopkins’s fine “Brother-Sister Marriage in Roman Egypt,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 22, no. 3 (1980): 303–354; Daniel Ogden, Polygamy, Prostitutes and Death: The Hellenistic Dynasties(London: Duckworth, 1999); Brent D. Shaw, “Explaining Incest: Brother-Sister Marriage in Graeco-Roman Egypt, Man 27, no. 2 (1992): 267–99.
Relatedly, on women in Ptolemaic Egypt: Roger S. Bagnall, “Women’s Petitions in Late Antique Egypt,” in Hellenistic and Roman Egypt: Sources and Approaches (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2006); Bagnall and Cribiore, 2006; J. P. V. D. Balsdon, Roman Women: Their History and Habits (London: Bodley Head, 1962); Joan B. Burton, Theocritus’s Urban Mimes: Mobility, Gender, and Patronage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 147–55. Elaine Fantham and others, Women in the Classical World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); Mary R. Lefkowitz and Maureen B. Fant, Women’s Life in Greece and Rome (London: Duckworth, 1992); Nori-Lyn Estelle Moffat, The Institutionalization of Power for Royal Ptolemaic Women (MA thesis, Clemson University, 2005); Kyra L. Nourse, Women and the Early Development of Royal Power in the Hellenistic East (PhD dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 2002); Pomeroy, 1990; Claire Préaux, “Le statut de la femme à l’époque hellénistique, principalement en Egypte,” Receuils de la Société Jean Bodin III (1959): 127–75; Rowlandson, 1998. On marrying later, Donald Herring, “The Age of Egyptian Women at Marriage in the Ptolemaic Period,” American Philological Association Abstracts (1988): 85.
1. Dead men don’t bite: Pompey, LXXVII; Plutarch, “Brutus,” XXXIII. (Here and elsewhere I have opted for the Dryden translation, revised by Arthur Hugh Clough [New York: Modern Library, 1992]; henceforth “ML translation.”)
2. “It’s a godsend”: Menander, “The Doorkeeper,” Menander: The Plays and Fragments (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 264.
3. “wretched little boat”: Appian, II.84. On Pompey’s end, Appian, II.83–6; Dio, LXII.iii–iv; CW, 103; Plutarch, “Pompey,” LXXVII.
4. The plague, flood, fire comparison: Florus, II.xiii.5.
5. CR’s arrival in Egypt: Appian, II.89; Dio, XLII.vi–viii; CW, 106; AW, 1; JC, XLVIII; Plutarch, “Pompey,” LXXX.5–6.
6. “to put an end to”: CW, III.10.
7. “she was at a loss”: JC, XLIX (ML translation); Plutarch, JC, XLIX. For the best discussion of C’s arrival, John Whitehorne, “Cleopatra’s Carpet,” Atti del XXII Congresso Internazionale di Papirologia II (1998): 1287–93. On the coastal road geography, Alan H. Gardiner, “The Ancient Military Road between Egypt and Palestine,” Journal of Egyptian Archeology 6, no. 2 (April 1920): 99–116. Achilles Tatius describes the trip from Pelusium to Alexandria via the Nile, III.9; see also Polybius, V.80.3. Interviews with Lionel Casson, April 18, 2009; John Swanson, September 10, 2008; Dorothy Thompson, April 22, 2008. Roger Bagnall points out that C might also have crossed the delta below the coastal area, where she would have had the advantage of a road, Bagnall to author, june 8, 2010.
8. “malevolent cunning”: Diodorus, I.30.7. Similarly MA, III.
9. “majestic”: Dio, XLII.xxxiv. 6.
10. “knowledge of how to make”: Dio, XLII.xxxiv.5.
11. impossible to converse with her: MA, XXVII; Dio, XLII.xxxiv.5.
12. “by his rapidity”: Dio, XLII.lvi.1.
13. “love-sated man”: Ibid., XLII.xxxiv.5.
14. “every woman’s man”: Suetonius, citing Curio, DJ, LII.3.
15. “a mere boy”: Dio, XLII.iii.3.
16. The depraved and wanton C: C is far from alone in having developed a retroactive sexual history. As Margaret Atwood notes of Jezebel, “The amount of sexual baggage that has accumulated around this figure is astounding, since she doesn’t do anything remotely sexual in the original story, except put on makeup.” “Spotty-Handed Villainesses: Problems of Female Bad Behavior in the Creation of Literature,” http://gos.sbc.edu/a/atwood.html.
17. “all men work more”: Dio, XXXVII.lv.2.
18. As one chronicler pointed out: “To the king I could have given back what he deserves, and in return for such a present to your brother, Cleopatra, could have sent your head.” Lucan puts words in CR’s mouth, 1069–71.
19. “Nothing was dearer”: AW, 70.
20. On Alexander the Great’s resting place: For an artful reconstruction of the tomb and its location, see Andrew Chugg, “The Tomb of Alexander the Great in Alexandria,” American Journal of Ancient History 1.2 (2002): 75–108.
21. household statues of Alexander: Robert Wyman Hartle, “The Search for Alexander’s Portrait,” in W. Lindsay Adams and Eugene N. Borza, eds., Philip II, Alexander the Great and the Macedonian Heritage (Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1982), 164.
22. Ptolemaic history: On the troublesome Ptolemaic genealogy, Bennett, 1997. Strabo is also eloquent on the subject. For the shaky argument that C was the daughter of a priestly Egyptian family, see Werner Huss, “Die Herkunft der Kleopatra Philopater,” Aegyptus 70 (1990): 191–203. And on the wobbly Ptolemaic grasp of power, Brian C. McGing, “Revolt Egyptian Style: Internal Opposition to Ptolemaic Rule,” Archiv für Papyrusforschung 43.2 (1997): 273–314; Leon Mooren, “The Ptolemaic Court System, Chronique d’Egypte LX (1985): 214–22. Anna Swiderek offers a nearly humorous overview of the family violence in “Le rôle politique d’Alexandrie au temps des Ptolémées,” Prace Historyczne 63 (1980): 105–15.
23. “an orgy of pillage”: François Chamoux, Hellenistic Civilization (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 135.
24. On Auletes the piper: The name may as well have been fitted to Ptolemy XII on account of his Dionysian devotion, Bianchi, 1988, 156.
25. house of her choice: Cited in Hopkins, 1980, 337.
26. On women and business: See especially Pomeroy, 1990, 125–73. The one-third estimate is Bowman’s, 1986, 98, and in part the result of inheritance and dowries.
27. “the women urinate” to “defy description”: Herodotus, The Histories, George Rawlinson, tr. (New York: Knopf, 1997), II.xxxv. On paradoxical Egypt, Diodorus, I.27.1–2; Strabo, 1.2.22, 17.2.5; the upside-down conviction dates back to Sophocles. Generally for the Greek view of Egypt, Phiroze Vasunia, The Gift of the Nile: Hellenizing Egypt from Aeschylus to Alexander (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).
28. “Built in the finest”: Philo, “On the Embassy to Gaius,” XLIII.338. C. D. Yonge translation, The Works of Philo (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1993).
29. the contested kingship: In some interpretations the petitioner, Cleopatra Selene, was in fact Auletes’ own mother. Either way, a Ptolemaic woman did not hesitate to make her opinion known—and was willing to cross an ocean to do so.
30. C’s mother: In Chris Bennett’s reconstruction, Cleopatra VI Tryphaena was Auletes’ cousin rather than his sister, 1997, 39–66.
31. giraffes, rhinoceroses, bears: Athenaeus, cited in Tarn and Griffith, 1959, 307.
32. death has been said: The point is Thompson’s, 1988, 78.
33. She did not have to venture far: The point is E. M. Forster’s, Forster, 2004, 34.
34. “The ears of a youth” to “be educated”: Cited in Cribiore, 2001, 69.
35. “prince of literature”: NH, II.iv.13.
36. “nursed in their learning”: Heraclitus, Homeric Problems, 1.5.
37. “for… as reason is the glory”: Cicero, Brutus, XV.59. As Elizabeth Rawson put it, “The end of rhetoric tended to be persuasion rather than truth, while the extravagant subjects set for the budding orator to prove his skill on often stimulated ingenuity rather than serious thought about important problems” (Cicero: A Portrait [London: Bristol Classical Press, 2001], 9).
38. On Pompey’s murder as exercise: Quintilian, 7.2.6 and 3.8.55–8.
39. “The art of speaking”: Ibid., 2.13.16. The lunatic ravings, Ibid., 2.10.8.
40. “Some women are younger”: George Bernard Shaw, “Notes to Caesar and Cleopatra,” in Three Plays for Puritans (New York: Penguin, 2000), 249.
41. “sparkling eyes”: Boccaccio, Famous Women (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 363. Boccaccio gives C the best of both worlds: As she “could captivate almost anyone she wished with her sparkling eyes and her powers of conversation, C had little trouble bringing the lusty prince [CR] to her bed.”
42. On hieroglyphs: John Baines, “Literacy and Ancient Egyptian Society,” Man 18, no. 3 (1983): 572–99.
43. On the population: Estimates range from 3 million (Thompson, 1988) to 6 million (Walter Schiedel, Death on the Nile [Leiden: Brill, 2001]) to 10 million (Grant, 2004); the Loeb editors (Diodorus, I) and Fraser (1972, II, 171–2) prefer 7 million. In the first century AD Josephus estimated the population of Egypt excluding Alexandria to be 7.5 million. Diodorus gives Alexandria a population of some 500,000, which seems plausible; Fraser prefers 1 million. See Roger S. Bagnall and Bruce W. Frier, The Demography of Roman Egypt (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
44. seven nationalities: Mostafa El-Abbadi, The Life and Fate of the Ancient Library of Alexandria (Paris: Unesco, 1990), 45.
45. “unlike that of”: Herodotus, 1997, IV.clxxxii.
46. “It was a pleasure”: MA, XXVII (ML translation).
47. a very similar Greek: On the koine of C and CR, interview with Dorothy Thompson, April 22, 2008; Geoffrey C. Horrocks, Greek: A History of the Language and Its Speakers (New York: Longman, 1997), 33–108.
48. “The better one gets”: Cicero, quoting his grandfather, On the Orator, 2:17–18, translation from Gruen, 1984, I, 262.
49. sex manuals: Andrew Dalby, Empire of Pleasures: Luxury and Indulgence in the Roman World (London: Routledge, 2000), 123.
50. “with fingers of its own”: Juvenal, Satire 6, 200.
51. “including some I should not care”: Quintilian, 1.8.6. He was referring in particular to Horace.
52. “extremely learned”: Cited in Lionel Casson, Libraries in the Ancient World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 78.
53. “She loved her husband”: Cited in M. I. Finley, Aspects of Antiquity (London: Chatto, 1968), 142.
54. “highly educated”: Pompey, LV.1–2 (ML translation).
55. “she was a woman”: Sallust, War with Catiline, XXV. Notes Cicero approvingly of a good Roman matron: “There was never a topic she thought she knew well enough.” Clement of Alexandria inventories female intellectuals in The Stromata, 4.19, citing especially the cake bakers among them.
56. On the library and museum: Roger S. Bagnall, “Alexandria: Library of Dreams,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 146, no. 4 (December 2002): 348–62; Casson, 2001; El-Abbadi, 1990; Andrew Erskine, “Culture and Power in Ptolemaic Egypt: The Museum and Library of Alexandria,” Greece & Rome 42, no. 1 (April 1995): 38–48. Fraser I, 1972, 452; Roy MacLeod, The Library of Alexandria (London: Tauris, 2000). Frederic C. Kenyon offers a fine guide to the scrolls themselves, Books and Readers in Ancient Greece and Rome (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932). A volume of Plato’s Symposium, notes Kenyon, might be twenty-three feet long.
57. “he’s either dead”: Cited in Marrou, 1956, 145.
58. CR’s fondness for pearls: DJ, XLVII.
59. “braver than all the men”: Manetho, The History of Egypt, Fr. 21b (Armenian version of Eusebius).
60. only one Latin poet: Lucan, X.60–1.
61. “was not in itself” to “bewitching”: MA, XXVII.2–3 (ML translation).
62. “striking,” exquisite: Dio, XLII.xxxiv.4. The sixth-century AD Byzantine writer John Malalas also extols her beauty.
63. “famous for nothing”: Boccaccio, cited in Walker and Higgs, 2001, 147.
CHAPTER III: CLEOPATRA CAPTURES THE OLD MAN BY MAGIC
For the Alexandrian War, Appian, Dio, CR, Lucan, and Plutarch, with caution. The finest modern source remains Paul Graindor, La guerre d’Alexandrie (Le Caire: Société Anonyme Egyptienne, 1931). It should be noted that CR and his ghostwriter offer the sole contemporary accounts of the war.
No one is better on Auletes and his travails than Mary Siani-Davies, especially her “Ptolemy XII Auletes and the Romans,” Historia 46 (1997): 306–40; reprinted, in slightly different form, in Cicero’s Speech: Pro Rabirio Postumo (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), 1–38. See also Dio, XXXIX.xiii–xv and liv–lix; Herwig Maehler, “Egypt under the Last Ptolemies,” Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies 30 (1983): 1–19. On the restoration, Dio, Plutarch, and most pointedly Cicero; Israel Shatzman’s fine “The Egyptian Question in Roman Politics,” Latomus30 (1971): 363–9; Richard S. Williams, “Rei Publicae Causa: Gabinius’s Defense of His Restoration of Auletes,” Classical Journal 81, no. 1 (1985): 25–38.
For CR’s Egyptian stay and the Nile cruise: Appian, Dio, Diodorus, Pliny, Strabo, Suetonius, Tacitus. I have relied a great deal on Victoria Ann Foertmeyer’s especially fine “Tourism in Graeco-Roman Egypt” (Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University, 1989). Also: Abdullatif A. Aly, “Cleopatra and Caesar at Alexandria and Rome,” Roma e l’Egitto nell’antichita classica, Atti del I Congresso Internazionale Italo-Egiziano (1989): 47–61; Lionel Casson, 1974, 256–91; Casson, Ships and Seamanship in the Ancient World (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971); T. W. Hillard, “The Nile Cruise of Cleopatra and Caesar,” Classical Quarterly 52, no. 2 (2002): 549–54; Louis E. Lord, “The Date of Julius Caesar’s Departure from Alexandria,” Journal of Roman Studies 28 (1930): 19–40; J. Grafton Milne, “Greek and Roman Tourists in Egypt,” Journal of Egyptian Archeology 3, 2/3 (1916): 76–80; Neal, 1975, 19–33; Thompson, “Hellenistic Royal Barges,” unpublished talk, Athens, 2009. The point of the trip: Willy Clarysse, “The Ptolemies Visiting the Egyptian Chora,” in Politics, Administration and Society in the Hellenistic and Roman World, Leon Mooren, ed., Bertinoro Colloquium (Leuven, Belgium: Peeters, 2000), 33–40. For winds, weather, wildlife: Sophia Poole’s vivid The Englishwoman in Egypt (Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 2003). For the second-century account of Lucius Memmius’s visit: George Milligan, ed., Selections from the Greek Papyri (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1910), 29–31.
1. Cleopatra captures the old man: A variation on Lucan, 360.
2. “A woman who is generous”: Quintilian, V.11.27.
3. “captivated” to “overcome”: Plutarch, XLIX (ML translation).
4. “to such an extent” to “assumed to be”: Dio, XLII.xxxiv.ii–xxv–ii.
5. “on the condition”: JC, XLIX (ML translation).
6. They assumed that they had signed: Florus, II.xiii.55–6.
7. a blundering sixth-century AD account: Chronicle of John Malalas, Books VIII–XVIII (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1940), 25.
8. depleted legions: A. B. Bosworth supplies an idea of their exhaustion, “Alexander the Great and the Decline of Macedon,” The Journal of Hellenic Studies 106 (1986): 1–12.
9. “promised to do”: Dio, XLII, xxxv.4.
10. “ability to inflame”: Cicero, Brutus, LXXX.279.
11. “particularly anxious”: CW, III.109.
12. “had given the kingdom”: Dio, XLII.xxxvi.3.
13. “busy, listening fellow” to “embarrassing war”: JC, XLIX (ML translation).
14. “a man of remarkable nerve”: CW, III.104.
15. “that the royal name”: CW, III.109.
16. Arsinoe burned with ambition: By one account (Strabo, 17.1.11) the two sisters had escaped together to Syria during the earlier uprising.
17. “One loyal friend”: Euripides, “Orestes,” in Euripides IV: Rhesus, The Suppliant Women, Orestes, Iphigenia in Aulis, David Grene and Richmond Lattimore, eds.; William Arrowsmith, tr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 805.
18. “She would not have been”: Graindor, 1931, 79. “Elle n’eut pas été femme—et une femme de la race des Lâgides—si elle n’avait été à la fois jalouse et humiliée de la séduction qu’exercait Cléopatre sur César.”
19. Epic struggle: For Mithradates’ epic battle against Rome, Philip Matyszak, Mithridates the Great: Rome’s Indomitable Enemy (Barnsley: Pen & Sword Military, 2008); and Adrienne Mayor, The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).
20. “no laws, human or divine” to “payment of money”: Sallust, “Letter of Mithradates,” 12, 17.
21. “fence of client states”: Polybius, V.34.
22. “a loss if destroyed”: Ronald Syme, The Roman Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 260.
23. consistent foreign policy: On Rome and the client kings, see Richard D. Sullivan’s superb Near Eastern Royalty and Rome (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990). Also David Braund, Rome and the Friendly King (New York: St. Martin’s, 1984); Anssi Lampela, Rome and the Ptolemies of Egypt: The Development of Their Political Relations, 273–80 BC (Helsinki: Societas Scientiarum Fennica, 1998); Mayor, 2010, on Mithradates’s parallel struggle; Willy Peremans and Edmond Van ’t Dack, “Sur les rapports de Rome avec les Lagides,” Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt (1972): 660–7; Shatzman, 1971. The housing project, Holbl, 2001, 224–25.
24. “just one continuous revel”: Dio Chrysostom, “The 32nd Discourse,” 69.
25. “These men habitually”: CW, III.110.
26. “They may be irrational animals”: Clement of Alexandria, “The Exhortation to the Greeks,” II.33p. The cat incident, Diodorus I.83. Evidently cats were a rarity on the northern side of the Mediterranean at the time. The animal worship invited ridicule from all quarters. See among others Juvenal, Satire 15.1; Philo, “On the Decalogue,” XVI.78–80, and “On the Contemplative Life,” 8; Josephus, Against Apion, II.81.
27. “bedeviled by certain individuals”: Cicero to Lentulus, 13 (I.2), January 15, 56.
28. “gained a highly invidious” to “royal largesse”: Ibid. 12 (I.1), January 13, 56.
29. “in his rage and spite”: MA, III (ML translation).
30. On the succession: J. C. Yardley, tr., Justin: Epitome of the Philippic History of Pompeius Trogus (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1994), 16.iiff; Jean Bingen, “La politique dynastique de Cléopâtre VII,” Comptes Rendus: Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres1 (1999): 49–66; Lucia Criscuolo, “La successione a Tolemeo Aulete ed i pretesi matrimoni di Cléopâtre VII con i fratelli,” in Egitto e storia antica dall’ellenismo all’età araba (1989): 325–39. Working from several double-dated papyri, Ricketts, “A Chronological Problem in the Reign of Cleopatra VIII,” Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists 16:3 (1979): 213–17, advanced the theory that C attempted to eliminate Ptolemy XIII by installing their younger brother as her consort in the spring of 50. Certainly relations had already soured with their older brother. See also Ricketts, “A Dual Queenship in the Reign of Berenice IV,” Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists 27 (1990): 49–60; T. C. Skeat (who argues against a joint Auletes-Cleopatra rule), “Notes on Ptolemaic Chronology,” Journal of Egyptian Archeology 46 (Dec. 1960): 91–4; and (for Berenice’s murky reign) John Whitehorne, “The Supposed Co-Regency of Cleopatra Tryphaeana and Berenice IV,” in Akten des 21. Internationalen Papyrologenkongresses (Stuttgart: B. G. Teubner, 1997), II, 1009–13.
31. “habituated to the ill-disciplined ways”: CW, III.110.
32. On C’s ascension: There is another possible explanation for Auletes’ choice of the two siblings. Heinen, 2009, speculates that C’s father early on recognized the powerful personality and dangerous ambitions of his second daughter and invited Roman backing expressly to neutralize them, 35–6.
33. On Memphis: See especially El-Abbadi, 1990, 58; Lewis, 1986, 69ff; Thompson, 1988.
34. “boasting made permanent”: John D. Ray, “The Emergence of Writing in Egypt,” World Archaeology 17, no. 3 (1986): 311.
35. The burning of the Alexandrian library: Seneca is the first to mention the book burning, citing a figure of 40,000 volumes, a number that swells in subsequent accounts, to become 700,000 by the fourth century AD. Both Dio and Plutarch believed the library to have burned. Centuries of scholarship have been devoted to the vexed question; see Fraser, 1972, I, 334–5, 476; Edward Alexander Parsons, The Alexandrian Library: Glory of the Hellenic World (New York: Elsevier, 1967). Will, 2003, 533, believes that the destruction was less than legend has implied. For a roundup of the sources, http//www.bede.org.uk/library.htm. By that estimate, 500,000 scrolls would require 24.5 miles of shelving, or a two-story building measuring 100 feet by 100 feet.
36. “And there was not a soul”: AW, 15.
37. It has been suggested that he broke off: John Carter, introduction to CW (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), xxix. See also John H. Collins, “On the Date and Interpretation of the Bellum Civile,” American Journal of Philology 80, no. 2 (1959): 113–32.
38. “put into effect”: AW, 3.
39. “most ready to assume”: Dio, XXXIX.lviii.1–2.
40. “in order, as they claimed”: Ibid., XLII.xlii.2.
41. “against a king”: AW, XXIV. Heinen, 2009, reads CR’s release of Ptolemy as an act of desperation, 106–113. Unaware that reinforcements were on their way, CR had not yet begun to feel the tide turning; he was frantically buying time. On the constitution of the Egyptian army, Polybius, V.35.13 and V.36.3; G. T. Griffith, The Mercenaries of the Hellenistic World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1935); Marcel Launey, Recherches sur les armées hellénistiques, 2 vols. (Paris: Boccard, 1949); Raphael Marrinan, “The Ptolemaic Army: Its Organisation, Development and Settlement,” (PhD dissertation, University College, London, 1998). Marrinan places a barracks of elite guards on or near the palace grounds.
42. “to think of his ancestral” to “tears of joy”: AW, 24.
43. “The entire population”: AW, 32.
44. “a prodigy of activity”: Gaston Boissier, Cicero and His Friends (New York: Cooper Square Publishers, 1970), 185.
45. CR acquitted himself: Volkmann, 1958, 75.
46. “which blew absolutely”: CW, III.107.
47. “had remained loyal”: AW, 33.
48. “out of voluptuousness”: Dio, XLIV.46.2. See also Cicero to Atticus, 226 (XI.15), May 14, 47, and 230 (XI.18), June 19, 47. In the fourth century AD Eusebius returned to the theme, charging that CR returned C to the throne “in return for sexual favors” (Eusebius, 183.2).
49. the gratuitous apology: The point is El-Abbadi’s; he is firmly convinced that the library was a casualty of the war, 1990, 151.
50. “As to the war in Egypt”: JC, XLVIII (ML translation).
51. “for whose sake” to “in Caesar’s company”: Dio, XLII. 44.
52. in C’s bed every night: Pelling, 1999, 140.
53. every visitor to Hellenistic Egypt: As Braund (1984, 79) notes: “The wise king was a lavish host when Romans came to visit.”
54. “in view of Caesar’s favor”: Dio, XLII.xxxiv.3.
55. “For the ruler labors”: Ibid., LV.xv.5–6.
56. “the first city of the civilized”: Diodorus, XVII.52.4. Even Cicero conceded as much, De Lege Agraria, II, XVI, 44.
57. “Looking at the city”: Achilles Tatius, V.i.6. He was a native son.
58. “It is not easy”: Dio Chrysostom, “The 32nd Discourse, To the People of Alexandria, 20,” in Alexandria: The Site and the History. Cited in Gareth L. Steen, ed. (New York: New York University Press, 1993), 58.
59. “The general rule”: Athenaeus, V.196d.
60. three hundred tons of dinner vessels: Ibid., 453.
61. “ordinary ware”: The point is Thompson’s, from “Athenaeus’s Egyptian Background,” in David Braund and John Wilkins, eds., Athenaeus and His World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 83–4. See Athenaeus, VI.229d.
62. “a silver platter”: Athenaeus, IV.129b.
63. On C’s wardrobe: Interview with Larissa Bonfante, February 2, 2009; interview with Norma Goldman, October 19, 2009; Casson, 2001, 24–5; Rowlandson, 1998, 313–34; Stanwick, 2002, 36–7, Dorothy Burr Thompson, Ptolemaic Oinochoai and Portraits in Faience (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), 29–30; Susan Walker and Morris Bierbrier, Ancient Faces: Mummy Portraits from Roman Egypt (London: British Museum Press, 1997), 177–80; Walker and Higgs, 2001, 65.
64. “prolonged parties until dawn”: DJ, LII (translation modified). Similarly Frontinus, Stratagems, I.i.5. Plutarch has CR drinking until dawn in order to ward off assassination attempts, JC, XLVIII.
65. Dionysian procession: For the best dissection of Athenaeus, V.197–203, see E. E. Rice, The Grand Procession of Ptolemy Philadelphus (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983). Thompson, “Philadelphus’s Procession: Dynastic Power in a Mediterranean Context,” in Mooren, 2000, 365–88. Thompson emphasizes that such a procession was meant to unite the populace and promote a sense of civic identity. Arrian, XXVIII, notes the triumph’s Dionysian roots.
66. “the shrewdest amasser”: Appian, preface, 10. The translation is Macurdy’s, 1932, 108.
67. Had Auletes married C to CR: Ptolemy VIII had tried unsuccessfully to woo a (rich) Roman woman, Cornelia, mother of the Gracchi, Plutarch, Tiberius Gracchus, I.
68. “Cleopatra has been able” to “gain Rome”: Lucan, X, 359–60.
69. “surrendered to Alexander”: Justin: Epitome of the Philippic History of Pompeius Trogus, J. C. Yardley, tr.
70. “she had a thousand”: Plutarch, MA, XXIX (ML translation).
71. Such an unsociable: Plutarch, “Demetrius,” III. By its very definition, empire made a mockery of family relations, inviting “ill-will and distrust.”
72. “everything that lifts people”: Dio, XXXVIII.xxxix.2.
73. “There is nothing”: Lucan, X.189–90. Egypt exerted no less of a spell on the Greeks, before and after C; it was the ultimate land of mystery. See E. Marion Smith, “The Egypt of the Greek Romances,” Classical Journal 23, no. 7 (April 1928): 531–7.
74. “the father of yellow journalism”: Robert Graves, introduction to Lucan, Pharsalia: Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars (New York: Penguin, 1956), 13.
75. “received with the utmost”: Letter of 112 BC, Select Papyri, II, 416 (George Milligan translation).
76. The Nile cruise: The dates remain in dispute. Lord, 1930, doubts the cruise altogether.
77. One modern historian goes so far: Heinen, 2009, 127. “It seems as if the author [of The Alexandrian War] knowingly sought to deceive his readers, and attempted not only to conceal the Nile journey, but to represent the chronological sequence of events in such a way that this episode could never have taken place.”
78. “I gulped down color”: Gustave Flaubert to his mother, November 17, 1849. The translation is from Empereur, 2002, 136.
79. The barge: Athenaeus, V.204e–206d. See also Nowicka, 1969.
80. hide supplies: Foertmeyer, 1989, 235.
81. “Once is enough”: Cicero to Atticus, 353 (XIII.52), December 19, 45.
82. “floating palace”: Nielsen, 1999, 136.
83. The misconceptions: Herodotus for the skull; Diodorus for the primordial half-mice; Strabo for the twins, turtle shells, grass serpents, and astonishing fecundity, XV.I.22–3. Similarly NH, from which come mice walking on two feet and the abbreviated pregnancies, VII.iiiff. Much of this descends from Aristotle (History of Animals, vii.4); Aulus Gellius picked up the theme, Attic Nights, X.ii. Dio Chrysostom has mythical man-eating mermaids in the desert, half snake, half siren, Discourse, 5.24–7. Ammianus Marcellinus, Roman History, XXII.15.14ff would marvel over dolphinlike creatures in the Nile, hippopotami that were “sagacious beyond all unreasoning beasts,” and the Egyptian ibis, a bird that laid eggs through its beak.
84. “I saw, and I was amazed”: Casson, Everyday Life in Ancient Egypt (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 142.
85. The Macedonian parallel: Nepos, Eumenes, III.4.
86. “and enjoyed himself”: Appian, II.89.
87. “She would have”: Dio, XLII.45.1.
88. “was neither creditable”: Dio, XLII.47.2.
CHAPTER IV: THE GOLDEN AGE NEVER WAS THE PRESENT AGE
Cicero, Pliny, and Plutarch are the invaluable guides to Rome and the Romans. For the trips there I have relied on the wisdoms of Lionel Casson, and especially on Travel in the Ancient World; see also Michel Reddé and Jean-Claude Golvin’s lavishly illustrated Voyages sur la méditerranée romaine (Paris: Actes Sud, 2005). On C in Rome, Erich Gruen’s debunking “Cleopatra in Rome: Facts and Fantasies,” in Myth, History and Culture in Republican Rome, David Braund and Christopher Gill, eds. (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2003); Edmond Van ’t Dack, “La Date de C. Ord. Ptol. 80–83 = BGU VI 1212 et le séjour de Cléopâtre VII à Rome,” Ancient Society 1 (1970): 53–67. Eusebius attests to the inevitable retinue, 183.30, as does Horace, in a different way; he regretted the wealthy woman’s veritable armature of attendants, Satires I.ii. 95–100.
On the administration of Egypt and the Ptolemaic machine, Bagnall and Derow, 1981, 253–255; Bingen, 2007, 156–255; Bowman, 1986; R. A. Hazzard, Imagination of a Monarchy: Studies in Ptolemaic Propaganda (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000); Maehler, 1983; Leon Mooren, La hiérarchie de cour ptolémaïque (Leuven, Belgium: Studia Hellenistica 23, 1977); Mooren, 2000; Dominic Rathbone, “Ptolemaic to Roman Egypt: The Death of the Dirigiste State?,” in Production and Public Powers in Classical Antiquity, Cambridge Philological Society, 26 (2000), 4–54; Geoffrey Rickman, The Corn Supply of Ancient Rome (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980); Michael Rostovtzeff, A Large Estate in Egypt in the Third Century BC (Madison: University of Wisconsin Studies, 1922); Select Papyri: Public Documents, II (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995); Raphael Taubenschlag, The Law of Graeco-Roman Egypt in the Light of the Papyri (Warsaw: Panstwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1955); D. J. Thompson, “Nile Grain Transport under the Ptolemies,” in Trade in the Ancient Economy, Peter Garnsey and others, eds. (London: Chatto & Windus, 1983), 64–75. For a fine, flavorful summary of papyri, ostraca, and inscriptions from C’s reign, see Ricketts, 1980, 114–36.
On Rome and its mores: Cicero, Horace, Juvenal, Martial, Pliny, Strabo. Among modern sources: Balsdon, Life and Leisure in Ancient Rome (London: Bodley Head, 1969); Casson, Everyday Life in Ancient Rome (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998); Florence Dupont’s colorful Daily Life in Ancient Rome (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993); Luc Duret and Jean-Pierre Neraudau, Urbanisme et metamorphoses de la Rome antique (Paris: Belles Lettres, 2001); Otto Kiefer, Sexual Life in Ancient Rome (New York: Dorset Press, 1993); Thomas Wiedemann, Adults and Children in the Roman Empire (London: Routledge, 1989); T. P. Wiseman, Catullus and His World: A Reappraisal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
For CR, Matthias Gelzer, Caesar: Politician and Statesman (Oxford: Blackwell, 1968); Adrian Goldsworthy, Caesar: Life of a Colossus (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006); Christian Meier, Caesar: A Biography (New York: MJF Books, 1982); Stefan Weinstock, Divus Julius (London: Oxford University Press, 1971); Maria Wyke, Caesar: A Life in Western Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); Zwi Yavetz, Julius Caesar and His Public Image (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983).
1. The golden age: Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard’s Almanack (1750).
2. “What excuses”: Euripides, “Andromache,” in The Trojan Women and Other Plays, James Morwood, tr. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 85–87.
3. CR’s silence: Dio, XLII.iii.3. All in Rome assumed CR would perish at the hands of the Egyptians, “as, indeed, they kept hearing was the case.” Cicero in particular was aware of CR’s difficulties extricating himself from Africa.
4. On birthing: Soranos, cited in Rowlandson, 1998, 286–9; Joyce Tyldesley, Daughters of Isis: Women of Ancient Egypt (New York: Viking, 1994), 70–5.
5. “not be prone to anger”: Third-century BC letter, cited in I. M. Plant, ed., Women Writers of Ancient Greece and Rome (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004), 79–80. Given the infant mortality rate, wet nurses were easy to find.
6. paternity: For a neat summary of the case against Caesarion, Balsdon, “Cleopatra: A Study in Politics and Propaganda by Hans Volkmann,” Classical Review 10, no. 1 (March 1960): 68–71. See also Heinen’s 1969 response to J. Carcopino’s 1937 repudiation of Caesarion, reprinted in Heinen, 2009, 154–75. Here as elsewhere the ancient sources are less than helpful: Suetonius both doubts the paternity and notes that CR allowed the child to be named for him, DJ, LII.
7. volumes of advice: See Keith Hopkins, “Contraception in the Roman Empire,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 8, no. 1 (1965): 124–51; Angus McLaren, A History of Contraception (London: Basil Blackwell, 1990); Sarah B. Pomeroy, Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves (New York: Schocken, 1975), 167–9; John M. Riddle’s Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992). Also Juvenal, Satire 6.595–6; NH, VI.42; Soranus, I.60–65.
8. The swelling Nile: Diodorus, I.36.7. For flora and fauna I have drawn on Poole, 2003. For river conditions, W. M. Flinders Petrie, Social Life in Ancient Egypt (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1923), 129–68; Amelia B. Edwards, A Thousand Miles up the Nile(London: Century, 1982), 319ff.
9. On the birthday gifts: Préaux, 1939, 394. Neal, 1975, suggests that the timing was so perfect that C may have chosen that date on which to announce the birth. She issued gold coins that year, one of only two occasions on which she did so.
10. Isis association: Pelling, 1999, 251–2; Ashton, 2008, 138. See Claire Préaux, Le monde hellénistique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1978), II, 650–5; Sarolta A. Takacs, Isis and Serapis in the Roman World (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1995); R. E. Witt, Isis in the Graeco-Roman World (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971). On Isis’s fate on the northern side of the Mediterranean, see especially Sharon Kelly Heyob, The Cult of Isis among Women in the Graeco-Roman World (Leiden, Holland: E. J. Brill, 1975).
11. The ax-wielding consul: Valerius, 1.3.41.
12. Ceremonial attire: O. E. Kaper to author, March 16, 2010.
13. “the queen should have greater power”: Diodorus, I.27. On Isis and women: Préaux, 1959, 127–75. Many have pointed to Isis’s involvement with the Virgin Mary; Foertmeyer, 1989, 279, notes that as late as the sixteenth century, a French cardinal smashed a statue to pieces on discovering it to be a representation of Isis rather than of the Virgin.
14. On the state and the clergy: Thompson, 1988. Guy Weill Goudchaux, “Cleopatra’s Subtle Religious Strategy,” in Walker and Higgs, 2001, 128–41. Also E. A. E. Reymond and J. W. B. Barns, “Alexandria and Memphis: Some Historical Observations,” Orientalia 46 (1977): 1–33. For the grant of asylum, see Kent J. Rigsby, Asylia: Territorial Inviolability in the Hellenistic World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). On the temple hierarchy, Gilles Gorré, “Les relations du clergé égyptien et des Lagides,” in Royaumes et cités hellénistiques des années323–55 av. JC, Olivier Picard and others, eds. (Paris: SEDES, 2003), 44–55.
15. The synagogue grant: Rigsby, 1996, 571–2.
16. The flood measurements: NH, X.li.60 on the Nile, V.x.58 on the heights. On the behavior of the Nile, Lewis, 1983, 105–15; Achilles Tatius, IV.11–15. Strabo is otherwise the best river guide.
17. “There was no famine”: See Jacques Vandier, La famine dans l’Egypte ancienne (New York: Arno Press, 1979), 35ff; as well as Dorothy Thompson, “Nile Grain Transport under the Ptolemies,” in Peter Garnsey et al., eds., Trade in the Ancient Economy(London: Chatto & Windus, 1983), 64–75. Heinen, “Hunger, Misery, Power,” reprinted in 2009, 258–87, notes that the ruling class won points as well for its benevolence and that the crises were often exaggerated. To stress the people’s misery was further to extol official munificence.
18. “Anyone familiar”: Flatterer, 790A. Centuries earlier Antigonus Gonatas, a particularly clear-eyed Macedonian king, had informed his son that the royalty business was “a glorious state of slavery.” Dio, LII.X.2, put it similarly: It was the sovereign’s fate to “always and everywhere both see and hear, do and suffer, only that which is disagreeable.”
19. the formulaic correspondence: AJ, XII.148, XII.166, XIV.306.
20. lulled an earlier Ptolemy to sleep: Flatterer, 71d. The tutor who slapped the dozing Ptolemy V Epiphanes awake was rewarded with a goblet of poison.
21. crush of business: For the paperwork, see Peter van Minnen, “Further Thoughts on the Cleopatra Papyrus,” Archiv für Papyrusforschung 47 (2001): 74–80; Peter van Minnen, “An Official Act of Cleopatra,” Ancient Society 30 (2000): 29–34.
22. “unadultered and without delay”: Thompson, 1983, 71; also Christopher Haas, Alexandria in Late Antiquity: Topography and Social Conflict (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 40–4. Generally on the functioning of the economy, Rostovtzeff, 1998; Préaux, 1939; Tarn and Griffin, 1959; Thompson, 1988; Dominic Rathbone, “Ptolemaic to Roman Egypt: The Death of the Dirigiste State?,” Cambridge Philological Society 26 (2000): 44–54.
23. “nobody is allowed”: Cited in M. M. Austin, The Hellenistic World from Alexander to the Roman Conquest: A Selection of Source Materials in Translation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 561.
24. “knew each day”: William Tarn, Hellenistic Civilization (London: Edward Arnold, 1959), 195.
25. “cheer everybody up”: Select Papyri, 1995, II.204.
26. “We may conclude”: Dorothy Crawford’s illuminating “The Good Official of Ptolemaic Egypt,” in Das Ptolemäische Agypten: Akten des internationalen Symposions 1976 (Mainz, Germany: von Zabern, 1978), 202.
27. “stolen donkeys”: John Bauschatz, “Policing the Chora: Law Enforcement in Ptolemaic Egypt,” Ph.D. dissertation (Duke University, 2005), 68.
28. They preyed equally: Bingen, “Les tensions structurelles de la société ptolémaïque,” Atti del XVII Conresso Internazionale di Papirologia III (Naples, 1984): 921–937; Rathbone, 2000.
29. On the grievances: Bagnall and Derow, 2004; Bevan, 1968; Maehler, 1983; Rostovtzeff, 1998. And on the benevolence: William Linn Westermann, “The Ptolemies and the Welfare of Their Subjects,” American Historical Review 43, no. 2 (1938): 270–87.
30. The infirm father: Select Papyri, II, 233. The girl had run away with her layabout of a boyfriend and—claimed her father—would no longer provide him with the necessities of life, despite having signed a contract to do so.
31. “come early in the morning”: Select Papyri, II.266. Translation from M. Rostovtzeff, “A Large Estate in Egypt in the Third Century BC: A Study in Economic History,” University of Wisconsin Studies 6, 1922, 120.
32. Taxation cases forbidden: Rostovtzeff, 1998, II, 1094.
33. “scalded my belly”: Cited in Bagnall and Derow, 1981, 195.
34. “When we inherited”: Cicero, The Republic, V.I.2. The translation is from Everitt, 2003, 180.
35. On Auletes and the family fortune: T. Robert S. Broughton, “Cleopatra and ‘The Treasure of the Ptolemies,’ ” American Journal of Philology 63, no. 3 (1942): 328–32. Here too opinions differ: Maehler, 1983, subscribes to “undisturbed prosperity.” Bowman, Casson, Ricketts, and Tarn agree. Rostovtzeff, 1998, is certain of C’s personal treasure but less sanguine about the economy under her reign, III, 1548. Thompson, Broughton, and Will see an economy in decline if not disarray. Athenaeus accuses C’s father of having dissipated the fortune of Egypt, V.206d. In 63 Cicero found Egypt still a flourishing kingdom, De Lege Agraria, II.XVI.44.
36. On the devaluation and C’s coins, see Guy Weill Goudchaux, “Was Cleopatra Beautiful? The Conflicting Answers of Numismatics,” in Walker and Higgs, 2001, 210–14. Chauveau, 2000, 86, succinctly terms devaluation “the ancient equivalent of printing money.”
37. “the equivalent of all of the hedge fund”: Interview with Roger Bagnall, November 21, 2008.
38. palace drinking contest: Athenaeus, X.415. Athenaeus (XII.522) also mentions that a philosopher earned twelve talents a year, which sounds high. The bail is from Casson, 2001, 35; he equates fifteen talents with millions of modern dollars. For the impressive monuments, Peter Green, Alexander of Macedon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 414. Marrinan, 1998, asserts that you could hire an army of 10,000 men for a year with 1,000 talents, 16. Diodorus reports that for a lowly Roman craftsman a talent was the equivalent of seventeen years’ wages, Josephus ( JW, I.483) that a prince with a private income of 100 talents was a man to be reckoned with. During the honeymoon of Egypto-Roman relations, a visiting Roman dignitary was offered gifts worth eighty talents—so immodest a sum he did not accept (Plutarch, “Lucullus,” 2). On a more prosaic level, a talent bought enough wheat to feed a man for seventy-five years. See also Tarn and Griffin, 1959, 112–16.
39. one contemporary list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richest_man_in_history.
40. The trip to Rome: This is based on the best educated guess in the business, that of Casson. Interviews, January 26, 2009, and June 18, 2009. See also Casson, 1971; Casson, The Ancient Mariners (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991); Casson, 1994. He describes the entire arduous system in “The Feeding of the Trireme Crews and an Entry in IG ii2 1631,” Transactions of the American Philological Association 125 (1995): 261–9; and in “The Isis and Her Voyage,” Transactions of the American Philological Association 81 (1950): 43–56. Casson to author, December 9, 2008. For comparisons see Philo, “Against Flaccus,” V.25ff, “On the Embassy to Gaius,” 250–3; JW, 1.280; Horace, Satires, I.5; Germanicus’s travels in Tacitus, Annals, II.50; Casson on Cicero and Pliny, 1994, 149–53. C may well have docked at Ostia, which Bagnall and Thompson think more likely; Casson preferred Puzzuoli, as there were at the time no docking facilities of any size at Ostia (Casson, 1991, 199). It is not impossible that C embarked or disembarked at Brundisium as would Horace (heading west) and as had Cicero, heading east. From there she would have made the long trek overland through hill country and along the Appian Way. That trip could be done in about seven days (Casson, 1994, 194–6).
41. The risks at sea: Achilles Tatius gives a fine (fictional) account of shipwreck, III.2–6. He washes up at Pelusium.
42. arrival in Rome: Eusebius, 183.3.
43. “like a camel”: Dio, XLIII. 23.2–3. See also Strabo, 16.4.16.
44. The advice regarding royal travel: Letter of Aristeas, 249, cited in T. A. Sinclair, A History of Greek Political Thought (London: Routledge, 1959), 292.
45. “two chariots”: An appalled Cicero to Atticus, 115 (V.1), February 20, 50, translation from Boissier, 1970, 120. Similarly Foertmeyer, 224; Plutarch, “Crassus,” XXI.6; Préaux, 1939, 561.
46. On the Rome of foul air and poor hygiene, and on the idyllic Janiculum: Leon Homo, Rome impériale et l’urbanisme dans l’antiquité (Paris: Albin Michel, 1951); Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities, III.xlv; Horace, Odes, II.29, 9–12; Martial, Epigrams, IV.64. Otherwise Cicero remains the best guide to Rome. The stray hand and ox: Suetonius, “Vespasian,” 5.4.
47. “Only the priests”: JC, LIX (ML translation).
48. “the only intelligent calendar”: O. Neugebauer, The Exact Sciences in Antiquity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1952), 71. For the Egyptian calendar (twelve months of thirty days, to which were added five days, and at the end of every fourth year six days), see Strabo, 17.1.29.
49. “to make them more desirous”: DJ, XLII.
50. “Easier for two philosophers”: Seneca, Apocolocyntosis, 2.2.
51. On the Roman triumph: Appian, Dio, Florus, Suetonius, and Mary Beard’s superb The Roman Triumph (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007).
52. “the most fortunate captive”: JC, LV.2.
53. “a woman and once considered”: Dio, XLIII.xix.3–4.
54. infants or chickens: On the political and legal rights of women, Mary Beard and Michael Crawford, Rome in the Late Republic (London: Duckworth, 2005), 41.
55. hundred swordsmen: Cicero to Quintus, 12.2 (II.9), June 56.
56. “Even if his slaves” to “carvers”: Juvenal, Satire 9, 100ff.
57. “absolutely devoted” to “bloom of youth”: Dio, XLIII.xliii.4.
58. “among the friends and allies”: Dio, XLIII.xxviii.1. Gruen, 1984, 259, challenges the date of the statue’s installation. He moves it forward by some fifteen years, to make it a tribute not to C but to her defeat.
59. “No one dances”: Cicero, Pro Murena, 13; translation from Otto Kiefer, Sexual Life in Ancient Rome (New York: Dorset Press, 1993), 166. As Athenaeus points out by contrast, “No other people are recorded as being more musical than the Alexandrians” (IV.176e).
60. “You have to be a very rich”: Juvenal, Satire 3, 236. The flying pots are also his, Ibid., 270ff.
61. “Otherwise he wouldn’t be so good”: Plutarch citing Antisthenes, “Pericles,” I.5.
62. “not a real man”: Athenaeus, V.206d.
63. “superficially civilized”: Lucan, in P. F. Widdows’s translation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 544.
64. “the last word”: Casson, 1998, 104.
65. “idle and foolish”: NH, XXXVI.xvi.75. In the Loeb, “They rank as a superfluous and foolish display of wealth.”
66. Greek and Latin: Quintilian acknowledges that the world sounded harsher in Latin, shorn as it was of the sweetest Greek letters, with which “the language at once seems to brighten us up and smile” (12.10).
67. word… for “not possessing”: Seneca, Epistle LXXXVII.40.
68. “gold-inlay utensils”: Dalby, 2000, 123. Dalby notes that a Greek accent alone carried with it a whiff of luxury, 122. Similarly Dio, LVII.xv.3; Valerius, Book IX, 1, “Of Luxury and Lust.” It seemed impossible to describe excess without recourse to Greek. It is Dalby who observes that “the classic practical manual of sexual behavior was in Greek, 123.
69. On the rise of luxury: Livy, 39.6; NH, XXXVI; Plutarch, “Caius Marius,” 34; Athenaeus, XII; Horace, Odes II, xv; Dalby, 2000; Wiseman, 1985, 102ff.
70. The stolen napkins: Catullus, Poems, 12 and 25; NH, 19.2.
71. the beautiful vase of poisonous snakes: Saint Jerome, cited in Jasper Griffin, “Virgil Lives!,” New York Review of Books ( June 26, 2008): 24.
72. Women in Rome: Richard A. Bauman, Women and Politics in Ancient Rome (London: Routledge, 1992); Diana E. E. Kleiner and Susan B. Matheson, eds., I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery, 1996); Barbara S. Lesko, “Women’s Monumental Mark on Ancient Egypt,” Biblical Archeologist 54, no. 1 (1991), 4–15; Rawson, 1985; Marilyn B. Skinner’s fine Sexuality in Greek and Roman Culture (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005); Wyke, The Roman Mistress (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). Interview with Larissa Bonfante, February 2, 2009.
73. “Hard work”: Juvenal, Satire 6, 289ff.
74. “teasing, scolding”: Samuel Butler, The Humour of Homer, and Other Essays (London: A. C. Fifield, 1913), 60. Edith Hamilton remarks on the absence of deceived husbands in The Roman Way (New York: Norton, 1993), 35.
75. “There’s nothing a woman”: Juvenal, Satire 6, 460–1.
76. even C’s eunuchs were rich: Seneca, Epistle LXXXVII.16.
77. The much-discussed pearls: Suetonius, “Caligula,” XXXVII; Horace, Satire 2.iii.239; Pausanias, 8.18.6; NH, IX.lviii. C’s two pearls—“the largest in the whole of history”—are from Pliny, IX.119–121. Lucan too ropes a fortune in pearls around C’s neck and through her hair, X.139–40. See also Macrobius, The Saturnalia, 3.17.14. In that much later account C and MA arrive at a wager over the pearl in the course of their extravagant feasting. They are well matched; “It was as the slave of this gluttony that he [MA] wished to make an Egyptian kingdom of the empire of Rome.” Plancus good-naturedly umpires the contest. For centuries C’s name remained a synonym for extravagance. In the fifth century AD Sidonius (Letter VIII.xii.8) described the most lavish of dinners as akin to “a feast of Cleopatra’s.”
78. “When I boiled a pearl”: B. L. Ullman, “Cleopatra’s Pearls,” Classical Journal 52, no. 5 (1957): 196. See also Prudence J. Jones, “The Cleopatra Cocktail,” 1999, http://www.apaclassics.org/AnnualMeeting/99mtg/abstracts/jonesp.html. She finds the pearls do dissolve. Keats included the melted pearls in “Modern Love.”
79. “the leaves at the top”: Hesiod, Works and Days, 680–1.
80. “did not let” to “name to the child”: DJ, LII.2.
81. “was her best card”: Aly, 1989, 51.
82. needed to press her case: Interview with Roger Bagnall, November 11, 2008.
83. passionate, admiring letters: Dio, LI.xii.3.
84. “A more raffish assemblage”: Cicero to Atticus, 16 (I.16.), early July 61. On broadening C’s base of support, Andrew Meadows to author, March 5, 2010.
85. On C’s concern with the reorganization of the East: Gruen, 2003, 271.
CHAPTER V: MAN IS BY NATURE A POLITICAL CREATURE
Generally on Rome’s political climate, Appian, Dio, Florus, Nicolaus of Damascus, Plutarch, Suetonius, and most eloquently, as always, Cicero. On Cicero, Plutarch, and Suetonius: for modern portraits, Everitt, 2003; and Elizabeth Rawson, Cicero: A Portrait(London: Bristol Classical Press, 2001). On the rain of honors, Appian, Cicero, Dio. For the geography of unlit Rome, the Janiculum Hill, etc.: Homo, 1951; Aly, 1989. On C and science, Monica Green, “The Transmission of Ancient Theories of Female Physiology and Disease through the Early Middle Ages” (Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University, 1985), 156–61, 185–9; Albert Neuberger, The Technical Arts and Sciences of the Ancients (London: Kegan Paul, 2003); Margaret Ott, “Cleopatra VII: Stateswoman or Strumpet?” (MA thesis, University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire, 1976); Okasha El Daly, “ ‘The Virtuous Scholar’: Queen Cleopatra in Medieval Muslim Arab Writings,” in Walker and Ashton, 2003, 51–6.
For the traditional Ides: Ovid, Fasti, iii, 523; Martial, Epigrams, IV.64. For the Ides of 44: Appian, II.111–119; Dio, XLIV; Florus, II.xiii.95; ND, 25.92, Fr. 130.19ff; JC, LXVI–LXVII; Plutarch, “Brutus,” XIV–XVIII; MA, XIII–XIV; DJ, LXXXII; VP, LVI. Cicero provides the earliest details, De Divinatione, II.ix.23. See also Balsdon, “The Ides of March,” Historia 7 (1958): 80–94; Nicholas Horsfall, “The Ides of March: Some New Problems,” Greece & Rome 21, no. 2 (1974): 191–99.
1. “Man is by nature”: Aristotle, Politics, I.1253a.
2. “O would that the female sex”: Euripides, “Cyclops,” in Euripides: Cyclops, Alcestis, Medea, David Kovacs, ed., tr. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), 185.
3. “I don’t know how a man”: Cicero to M. Curius, 200 (XII.28), c. August 46.
4. “general perturbation”: Cicero to Rufus, 203 (IV.4), c. October 46.
5. “endless armed conflict”: Cicero to A. Torquatus, 245 (VI.2), April 45.
6. C’s fashion: On the hairstyle, Peter Higgs, “Searching for Cleopatra’s Image: Classical Portraits in Stone,” in Walker and Higgs, 2001, 203. On contemporary Egyptomania, Carla Alfano, “Egyptian Influences in Italy,” Ibid., 276–91. See also Kleiner, 2005, 277–8.
7. “neither a chatterbox”: Aulus Gellius, citing Varro, in The Attic Nights, XIII.xi.2–5. The translation is from Balsdon, 1969, 46.
8. chicken or the egg: For the dinner discussions, Plutarch, Table Talk (Quaestiones Convivales), II.3 (635)–V.9 (684).
9. “He was not at all concerned”: Dio, XLIII.xxviii.1.
10. “a great deal of barking”: Ibid., XLVI.xxvi.2.
11. “I knew no security” to “treachery of old ones”: Cicero to Cn. Plancius, 240 (IV.14), c. late 46.
12. “of a literary kind”: Cicero to Atticus, 393.2 (XV.15), c. June 44.
13. “blood nor spirit”: Cicero, De Lege Agraria, II.42.xvii (traslation modified).
14. whiff of dishonor: Cicero to Atticus, 25 (II.5), c. April 59.
15. “The arrogance of the Queen”: Cicero to Atticus, 393 (XV.15), c. June 13, 44.
16. “a certain foolish vanity”: Ibid., 38 (II.17), c. June 59.
17. Plutarch was more explicit: Plutarch, “Demosthenes and Cicero,” II.1.
18. “He was the greatest boaster”: Dio, XXXVIII.xii.7.
19. governed a vast kingdom: MA, LVI.
20. It bothered Cicero: As he put it in a summer 50 letter to Atticus, 117 (VI.3): “I have never put up with rudeness from the most powerful personages.”
21. “rescue almost from the brink”: Attributed to Sallust, “Letter to Caesar,” XIII.5.
22. “was impossible to terrify”: Appian, II.150.
23. “encouraged him and puffed him up”: Dio, XLIV.iii.1–2.
24. “from one to another”: Appian, II.117.
25. “bloodstained and cut”: Ibid., III.35.
26. “Run!”: Dio, XLIV.xx.3.
27. “the city looked as if”: ND, 25.
28. The Helen of Troy comparison: Cicero, “Philippic” 2.XII.55. Nor does C figure on Florus’s list of CR’s misdeeds, Book II.
29. “because they wished” to “as he pleased”: Dio, XLIV.vii.3–4.
30. “for the purpose of begetting”: Suetonius, citing an anonymous source, DJ, LII.
31. “taking with him the resources”: Ibid., LXXIX.
32. founder of the Roman Empire: Collins, 1959, 132.
33. “silly folk”: DJ, LVI.
34. “And so, every kind of man”: ND, 19.
35. “proud and thunderous” to “dirge-like”: Appian, II.144–6.
36. “almost the whole city”: Dio, XLV.xxiii.4–5.
37. bloodthirsty barbarians: For the Roman view of the “facile, fickle” (Dio, LI.xvii.1) Alexandrians, Reinhold, 1988, 227–8. Dio Chrysostom, “The 32nd Discourse”; Polybius, The Histories, XV.33; Philo (himself an Alexandrian), “Flaccus,” V.32–35. Philo thought his countrymen unmatched in their insubordination, “being constantly in the habit of exciting great seditions from very small sparks” (Flaccus, IV.16). The emperor Hadrian wrote off the Alexandrians as “a rebellious, good-for-nothing, slanderous people,” single-mindedly devoted to lucre. To Florence Nightingale, disembarking in 1849 and not at her enlightened best in Egypt, the Alexandrians were “the busiest and the noisiest people in the world,” November 19, 1849, cited in Gerard Valleé, ed., Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2003), 144. For the Rome/Alexandria encounter, see also M. P. Charlesworth, “The Fear of the Orient in the Roman Empire,” Cambridge Historical Journal2, no. 1 (1926): 9–16; and Jasper Griffin, Latin Poets and Roman Life (London: Duckworth, 1985).
38. “for they stood in awe”: Dio, XLIV.xv.2.
39. “I detest” to “have a spleen”: Cicero to Atticus, 393 (XV.15), c. June 13, 44 (translation modified).
40. “regulations, favours, and gifts”: Appian, II.133.
41. “an orgy of loot”: Hirtius to Cicero, cited in Cicero to Atticus, 386 (XV.6), c. June 44.
42. “There is a very large element”: Dio, XLV.viii.4.
43. “never showing its ordinary radiance”: JC, LXIX (ML translation).
44. “Who can adequately express”: VP, II.lxxv.
45. Visit of a sovereign: Plutarch, “Lucullus,” II.5. Herod too is escorted by the authorities to Alexandria, JW, I.279.
46. “Alexandria is home”: Cited in Siani-Davies, 2001, 105 (“Pro Rabirio Postumo,” 13.35). Regarding Alexandria, Cicero continues: “It is from its inhabitants that writers of farces draw all their plots.”
47. plenty of precedent: For example, Arrian, 6.28.3.
48. “There’s a common proverb”: Cicero to Plancus, 407 (X.20), May 29, 43.
49. “so utterly unsociable”: Plutarch, “Demetrius,” III.3.
50. Isis attire: Interview with Norma Goldman, October 19, 2009. Judith Lynn Sebesta and Larissa Bonfante, The World of Roman Costume (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001); Dorothy Burr Thompson, 1973, 30; Elizabeth J. Walters, Attic Grave Reliefs that Represent Women in the Dress of Isis (Princeton: American School of Classical Studies at Athens, 1988); Apuleius, Metamorphoses, XI.iii–iv.
51. Dendera: Goudchaux, “Cleopatra’s Subtle Religious Strategy,” 2001, 138–9; Bingen, 2007, 73; Kleiner, 2005, 85–8; Jan Quaegebeur, especially “Cléopâtre VII et le temple de Dendara,” Göttinger Miszellen 120 (1991): 49–73. Nearly 1,900 years later Florence Nightingale visited Dendera. Generally she had little patience for the Ptolemies; she remained unimpressed by the “acres of bas-reliefs” and the miles of sculpture. The complex struck her as vulgar. “The earliest name which you find there is of that vile C,” she huffed, Vallée, 2003, 397. Nightingale certainly could not miss her; C appears no fewer than seventy-three times on the temple and chapel walls.
52. “I cannot describe”: Cited in Michael D. Calabria, ed., Florence Nightingale in Egypt and Greece (Albany: SUNY Press, 1997), 31.
53. On the Caesareum: Philo, “On the Embassy to Gaius,” C. D. Yonge, tr., The Works of Philo (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1993), 150–1. See also Ferdinando Castagnoli, “Influenze alessandrine nell’urbanistica della Roma augustea,” Rivista di filologia e di istruzione classica 109 (1981): 414–23; Ammianus Marcellinus, XXII.16.12.
54. intellectual revival: See Gabriele Marasco’s fine “Cléopâtre et les sciences de son temps,” Sciences exactes et sciences appliquées à Alexandrie, Gilbert Argoud and others, eds. (1998): 39–53; Fraser, 1972, I, 87, 311–22, 363, 490.
55. contradicting himself: Seneca, Epistle LXXXVIII.37. See also Athenaeus, IV.139. For the book-forgetter, Quintilian, 1.8.20–1; Ammianus Marcellinus, XXII.16.16; H. A. Russell, “Old Brass-Guts,” Classical Journal 43:7, 1948, 431–2.
56. “intellectual stimulus”: Rawson, 1985, 81.
57. “rubbed until it sprouts”: Galen, cited by Ott, 1976, Appendix A, 33.
58. “all sorts of deadly” to “set one upon another”: MA, LXXI.
59. “great scientific curiosity” to “an actual embryo”: Cited in Ott, 1976, Appendix C, 35. Possibly another Queen C was intended. For C the scientist, see also Plant, 2004, 2–5, 135–47.
60. “that I always used”: Cited in Monica Green, 1985, 186. For C’s involvement with alchemy, see F. Sherwood Taylor, “A Survey of Greek Alchemy,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 50, I (1930): 109–39. The word alchemy—Arabic in origin—postdates C. It did not help that various alchemists published under the pen name Cleopatra. See Plant, 2004, 145.
61. “magic arts and charms”: Plutarch, MA, XXV.4 (ML translation).
62. “general malaise” to “hatred of evil”: April 12, 41, cited in Marie-Thérèse Lenger, Corpus des ordonnances des Ptolémées (Brussels: Palais des Académies, 1964), 210–5.
63. “No wild beast”: Plutarch, “Cicero,” XLVI.
64. “what humiliations”: Plutarch, “Cato the Younger,” XXXV.4 (ML translation).
65. “she had not been terrified”: Appian, V.8.
66. “the most aggressive of men”: Ibid., II.88. His violent temper was legendary. Appian adds that the Parthian mounted bowmen joined Cassius of their own volition, attracted by his reputation, IV.59.
67. Brutus’s stern reminder: Plutarch, “Brutus,” XXVIII.
68. “not only ruined everything”: Appian, V.8.
69. On Quintus Dellius: Seneca the Elder, Suasoriae, 1.8; JA, 14.394, 15.25; JW, 1.290; Seneca the Younger, De Clementia, I.x.1.
70. “had no sooner seen her face” to “kindest of soldiers”: MA, XXV (ML translation).
71. Hera in the Iliad: It is unclear whether Plutarch or Dellius invokes the Homeric comparison, Ibid.
72. “accompanied by a remarkable crowd”: Appian, III.12.
73. “a great halo”: Dio, XLV.iv.4.
74. “the butchery” to “craftily and patiently”: Appian, III.13–14.
75. “to stand behind me” to “other finery”: Ibid., III.15–17.
76. “all the prestige”: Florus, II.xv.2.
77. “that you in fact possess” to “good enough for me”: Appian, III.18–19.
78. The hostilities to be encouraged: Appian, III.21, 85; Dio, XLV.xi.3–4, XLVI.xl.4, XLVI.xli.1.
79. malign, blackmail, slander: Quintus Fufius Calenus, cited in Dio, XLVI.viii.3–4.
80. “I don’t trust his age”: Cicero to Atticus, 419 (XVI.9), November 4, 44.
81. “my wonderful Dolabella”: Cicero to Atticus, 369 (XIV.15), May 1, 44.
82. “No affection was”: Cicero to Dolabella, 371A (XIV.17A), May 3, 44.
83. “The gall of the man!”: Cicero to Atticus, 373 (XIV.18), May 9, 44.
84. “the systematic organization”: Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (New York: Library of America, 1990), 13. Adams was speaking of Massachusetts politics.
85. A’s carousing wake: Suetonius, “On Rhetoricians,” V (29).
86. “He was a spendthrift”: VP on Curio the Younger, II.xlviii.4. Translation is from Cicero to Atticus, 14 (I.14), February 13, 61, editor’s note.
87. “All over the city” to “their legacy?”: Appian, III.28.
88. “to set them at odds”: Dio, XLVI.xli.
89. provided that Octavian did: Ibid., 29.
90. wildly shouting oath after oath: Appian, III.39; Seneca on Octavian’s temper, De Clementia, I.xi.1.
91. “On the other hand”: Cicero to Atticus, 425.1 (XVI.14), c. November 44.
92. “The man who crushes”: Cicero to Plancus, 393 (X.19), c. May 43.
93. “In truth, we ought not to think”: Cicero, “Philippic,” VI.III.7.
94. “the fume of debauch”: Cicero, “Philippic,” II.xii.30; “the belching,” Cicero to Cornificius, 373 (XII.25), c. March 20, 43; “spewing,” Cicero to Cassius, 344 (XII.2), c. late September 44.
95. “It is easy to inveigh”: Cicero, “Pro Caelio,” xii.29.
96. “And so, if by chance”: Ibid., xvii.42.
97. “an air of high”: Cicero to Quintus, 21.5 (III.1), September 54.
98. “would prefer to answer”: Cicero, “Philippic,” VI.ii.4. Why would A do so? Because, volunteered Cicero, “he so enjoys lecheries at home and murders in the forum.”
99. “to exchange enmity”: Appian, IV.2.
100. “Lepidus was actuated”: Florus, II.xvi.6.
101. “their staunchest friends”: Dio, XLVII.vi.1.
102. “Extra names”: Appian, IV.5.
103. “The whole city filled”: Dio, XLVII.iii.1. The heads were delivered for fixed rewards, the rest of the body left to rot in the street. You could tell that the wrong person had been killed if the corpse retained its head. Appian, IV.15. On the ingenious wife, Appian, IV.40.
104. “his face wasted with anxiety”: Plutarch, “Cicero,” XLVII.3.
105. On Cicero’s death: Appian, IV.19–20; Plutarch, “Cicero,” XLVII; Dio, XLVII.viii; Eusebius, Chronicles, 184–3; Livy, “Fragments,” CXX.
106. On Brutus’s death: Florus, II.xvii.14–15; VP, II.lxx; Appian, IV.135; DA, XIII; Plutarch, “Brutus,” LII–LIII.
107. “but its results”: Dio, XLIV.ii.1.
108. a reputation for invincibility: Appian, V.58.
CHAPTER VI: WE MUST OFTEN SHIFT THE SAILS WHEN WE WISH TO ARRIVE IN PORT
On A, his women, and his marriages, Eleanor Goltz Huzar’s very fine “Mark Antony: Marriages vs. Careers,” Classical Journal 81, no. 2 (1985/6): 97–111; the indispensable Pelling, 1999, as well as Pelling, Plutarch and History: Eighteen Studies (London: Duckworth, 2002). For C’s arrival in Tarsus, Plutarch, with a little help from Athenaeus. Appian completes the picture, but without detail; Strabo and Xenophon (Anabasis, I.2.23) describe the city. Françoise Perpillou-Thomas gives a vivid idea of Egyptian entertaining, “Fêtes d’Egypte ptolémaique et romaine d’après la documentation papyrologique grecque,” Studia Hellenistica 31 (1993). For this and the subsequent chapter, the portrait of Herod is drawn primarily from Josephus, JA and JW. For modern biographies: Michael Grant, Herod the Great (London: Weidenfeld, 1971); A. H. M. Jones’s excellent The Herods of Judaea (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967); Samuel Sandmel, Herod: Profile of a Tyrant (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1967).
1. “We must often shift”: Cicero to Lentulus Spinther, 20 (I.9), December 54. The (loose) translation is from Boissier, 1970, 223. “Unchanging consistency of standpoint has never been considered a virtue in great statesmen,” explained Cicero, justifying his change of horses.
2. “Yet what difference”: Aristotle, The Politics, II.vi.4–7.
3. seemed uncannily: Appian, IV.129.
4. “had known her” to “intellectual power”: MA, XXV.
5. “puts the height of beauty”: Pelling, 1999, 186.
6. “the greatest confidence” to “as if in mockery”: MA, XXV.4–XXVI.1. The latter from the ML translation, where the Loeb has “she so despised and laughed the man to scorn as to sail up the river.” The point is that C was neither cowed nor impressed by A. There is a less strategic explanation for the delay as well: The high priest of Egypt died on July 14. C may have been detained by clerical responsibilities.
7. The trip across the Mediterranean: Again reconstructed with the assistance of Lionel Casson, interview, January 26, 2009. As Casson put it: “The only possible conclusion is that Cleopatra dolled up a local river boat,” letter to author, March 22, 2009.
8. “She herself reclined” to “good of Asia”: MA, XXVI (translation modified).
9. “Affecting the same pursuits”: Flatterer, 51e (translation modified). France Le Corsu argues, not altogether convincingly, that C posed in Tarsus as Isis rather than Aphrodite, “Cléopâtre-Isis,” in Bulletin de la Société Francaise d‘Egyptologie, Paris, 1978, no.82, 22–33.
10. “At once, then, wishing”: MA, XXVI.4.
11. “a spectacle that has seldom”: Ibid., XXVI.4 (ML translation).
12. On the jewelry: Thompson, 1973, 29; O. E. Kaper to author, March 6, 2010.
13. “that all these objects”: Athenaeus, IV.147f.
14. “litters and bearers”: Athenaeus, 148b.
15. “beggared description”: Plutarch, MA, XXVI.4.
16. “Kings would come”: Ibid., XXIV.
17. “irresistible charm” to “her discourse”: Ibid., XXVII.
18. Proudly she catalogued: “She did not excuse herself so much as present a list of what she had done for him and Octavian,” Appian, V.8.
19. “was ambitious to surpass” to “rusticity”: MA, XXVII.
20. “Perceiving that his raillery”: Ibid., XXVII (ML translation).
21. “she wished to rule”: Ibid., X.
22. “so that neither the senate”: Dio, XLVIII.iv.1.
23. “no mean city”: Paul the Apostle, in Acts of the Apostles, 21:39.
24. On the mess made of Tarsus: Cassius Parmensis to Cicero, 419 (XII.13), June 13, 43; Appian, IV.1xiv and V.vii. Dio claims the Tarsans were so devoted to CR that they had changed the name of their city to Juliopolis, XLVII.xxvi.2. See also Dio Chrysostom, “The 33rd Discourse.”
25. “bold coquette”: Plutarch, JC, XLIX.2.
26. “The moment he saw her”: Appian, V.8.
27. “succumbed with good will”: Syme, 2002, 214. For Syme’s doubts, 274–5. This too is conjecture, though the opposite assertions have been made with equal certainty, concerning both A and CR. See Anatole France’s C, in On Life and Letters (London: Bodley Head, 1924): “It is certain that Caesar loved Cleopatra” (114) vs. Froude, 1879: “Nor is it likely that, in a situation of so much danger and difficulty as that in which he [CR] found himself, he would have added to his embarrassments by indulging in an intrigue at all” (456). Froude equally doubts C’s visit to CR in Rome. Gruen scrubs that stay of all romance.
28. “and yet it was thought”: Plutarch, “Alexander the Great,” XLVII. He was writing of Alexander’s useful marriage to a Bactrian princess.
29. “brought him to fall in love”: JA, XIV.324 (in William Whiston’s translation [Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 1998]).
30. “not only because of his intimacy”: JA, XV.93.
31. a slave to his love: See for example Florus, II.XXI.11.
32. “an ill name for familiarity”: MA, VI.5 (ML translation).
33. On the Temple of Artemis: NH, XXXVI.xxi; Livy, History of Rome, I.XLIV. Pliny provides a fine description of the temple construction. So difficult has it been to settle the main lintel into place that the architect contemplated suicide.
34. “Now Cleopatra had put to death”: JW, I.360 (Whiston translation). Similarly JA, XV.89. Josephus continues: Having killed off her own family, one after another, until no relative remained, C “was now thirsting for the blood of foreigners.”
35. Arsinoe had conspired: See P. J. Bicknell, “Caesar, Antony, Cleopatra and Cyprus,” Latomus 36 (1977): 325–42, for an elaborate case that Arsinoe had been rehabilitated and set up as a secondary Ptolemaic ruler, a foil to her sister, after the triumph of 46. Green, 1990, subscribes to the theory as well, 669. Strabo indeed has A giving Cyprus to both sisters, 14.6.6.
36. “So straight away”: Appian, V.9.
37. “distributing rewards”: AW, 65.
38. A’s neglect of affairs: Appian, V.10.
39. “He suffered her to hurry”: MA, XXVIII.
40. “not ruled by himself” to “ordinary person”: Appian, V.11.
41. “the sports and diversions”: MA, XXVII.1.
42. “The members”: Ibid., XXVIII (ML translation).
43. The kitchen chaos: Athenaeus, X.420e.
44. “The guests are not many”: Plutarch, MA, XXVIII (ML translation).
45. “It is no easy matter to create harmony”: Cicero to Quintus, 1.36 (I.1), c. 60–59.
46. On C as horsewoman: Pomeroy, 1990, 20–3; interview with Branko van Oppen, February 27, 2010. Arsinoe III helped to rally the Ptolemaic army, presumably on horseback, Polybius, V. 79–80.
47. “some fresh delight” to “serving maiden”: MA, XXIX. There is an alternate explanation for the masquerade. Herod was known to stroll disguised at night among his people so as to gauge the political climate. He was not alone in the practice.
48. “You are forever being frivolous”: Dio Chrysostom, “The 32nd Discourse,” I.
49. “coarse wit” to “comic mask with them”: MA, XXIX.
50. “to whom his sojourn”: Appian, V.I.11.
51. “was often disarmed by Cleopatra”: Plutarch, “Demetrius and Antony,” III.3.
52. “Leave the fishing rod” to “kingdoms, and continents”: MA, XXIX (translation modified).
53. “For such a rebuke”: Flatterer, 61b. Shakespeare packaged the same formula differently: “Other women cloy the appetites they feed, but she makes hungry where most she satisfies.”
54. “Although I have made enquiries”: Appian, V.21.
55. “so under the sway”: Dio, XLVIII.xxvii.1.
56. “for teaching Antony”: MA, X.
57. “that he would rather die”: Appian, V.55.
58. “that if Italy remained at peace”: Ibid., V.19.
59. “because she was angry with Antony”: Ibid., V.59.
60. “his passion for Cleopatra”: Dio, XLVIII.xxviii.3.
61. “at least an infinitely loyal”: Balsdon, 1962, 49.
62. “now rid of an interfering woman”: Appian, V.59. Similarly, Dio, XLVIII.xxviii.3–4.
63. “a great and mighty shout” to “necks as they dived”: Dio, XLVIII.xxxvii.2.
64. “their ships were moored”: Appian, V.73.
65. “A wonder of a woman” to “complete salvation”: MA, XXXI. Tacitus suggests that A’s marriage to Octavia was a trap from the start, Annals, I.X.
66. an object of gossip: Boccaccio, Concerning Famous Women (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1963), 192.
67. “immediately praised to the skies” to “savior gods”: Appian, V.74.
68. A’s rescue of Octavian: Appian, V.67–8.
69. “rash boy”: Ibid., III.43 (Loeb translation).
70. “behaved with excessive sportsmanship”: DA, LXXI. Translation from Everitt, 2003, 265.
71. “guardian genius” to “that young man”: MA, XXXIII. Similarly Flatterer, “The Fortune of the Romans,” 319–320. C is absent from the Moralia account, in which Plutarch makes the soothsayer A’s friend, “often wont to speak freely to him and admonish him.” Surveying A’s greater age, experience, renown, and army, the amateur astrologer offers A the same advice concerning Octavian: “Avoid him!” To Neal, 1975, the warning was a veiled one against breaking openly with Octavian. C preferred that A make his name in the east, which would obviate the need for a showdown, 102.
72. “lay inside with his friends” to “the ceilings”: Athenaeus, IV.148c.
73. “Nearly everything” to “against the Parthians”: Dio, XLVIII.liv.7.
74. “lulled to rest”: MA, XXXVI. Writing a morality tale, Plutarch had set out to demonstrate “that great natures exhibit great vices also, as well as great virtues,” “Demetrius,” I.
75. On the coins: Walker and Higgs, 2001, 237; Jonathan Williams, “Imperial Style and the Coins of Cleopatra and Mark Antony,” in Walker and Ashton, 2003, 88; Agnes Baldwin Brett, “A New Cleopatra Tetradrachm of Ascalon,” American Journal of Archaeology 41, no. 3 (1937): 461. As Theodore V. Buttrey notes (“Thea Neotera: On Coins of Antony and Cleopatra,” American Numismatic Society Notes 6, [1954], 95–109), Ptolemaic couples never appear pictured on opposite faces of a coin.
CHAPTER VII: AN OBJECT OF GOSSIP FOR THE WHOLE WORLD
For the best guide to the baroque composition of the East and its colorful parade of dynasts, see Sullivan, 1990. On A’s eastern politics, Albert Zwaenepoel, “La politique orientale d’Antoine,” Etudes Classiques 18:1 (1950): 3–15; Lucile Craven, Antony’s Oriental Policy Until the Defeat of the Parthian Expedition (Columbia: University of Missouri, 1920); Neal, 1975; A. N. Sherwin-White, Roman Foreign Policy in the East (London: Duckworth, 1984). As in the previous chapter, the portrait of Herod is drawn from Josephus’s colorful account. On Antioch, A. F. Norman, ed., Antioch as a Centre of Hellenic Culture as Observed by Libanius (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000); Libanius, and Cicero. On C’s titles and heritage, “Cléopâtre VII Philopatris,” Chronique d’Egypte 74 (1999): 118–23. For the Donations, K. W. Meiklejohn, “Alexander Helios and Caesarion,” Journal of Roman Studies 24 (1934): 191–5.
On Octavian, G. W. Bowersock, Augustus and the Greek World (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965); Everitt, 2006; Kurt A. Raaflaub and Mark Toher, eds., Between Republic and Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).
1. “The greatest achievement”: Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, II.xlv. Translation from David Markson, The Last Novel (Berkeley: Shoemaker and Hoard, 2007), 107. Markson notes that Thucydides does women the great favor of mentioning none.
2. “slinked into”: Strabo, 16.2.46.
3. The inexhaustible Herod: JW, I.238–40, 429–30; the miraculous escape: JW, I.282–4, 331–4, 340–1, among others; astonishing talent: JA, XV.5; Senate confirmation: JW, I.282–85; AJ, XIV.386–7.
4. “noble families were extended”: MA, XXXVI.
5. “into his predecessor’s bedroom slippers”: Everitt, 2006, 148.
6. “realms and islands”: Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, V.2.111–13.
7. “The greatness of the Roman empire”: MA, XXXVI.
8. “an army more conspicuous”: Ibid., XLIII.
9. “made all Asia quiver”: Ibid., XXXVII.
10. “the nobility of his family”: Ibid., XLIII (ML translation).
11. no one in the Mediterranean world: Interview with Casson, June 11, 2009. Strabo writes the gift down to cedar, 14.5.3.
12. The disapproving Plutarch: MA, XXXVI.
13. Sixteenth regnal year: By our count it would be fifteen; the ancients had no zero.
14. “It seems to me”: Bingen, 1999, 120.
15. Even Plutarch could not call it a mistake: Plutarch, “Demetrius and Antony,” I.2. He recoiled from A’s marriage to C, “although she was a woman who surpassed in power and splendour all the royalties of her time” excepting only—as Plutarch saw it—the Parthian king.
16. A’s attachment to women: Appian, V.76. Dio, XLVIII.xxiv.2–3 has A falling head over heels for C.
17. On Jericho: Strabo, 16.1.15; Justin, 36.iii.1–7; Florus, I.xl.29–30; JW, I.138–9; JW, IV.451–75; HN, XII.111–24; Diodorus, II.xlviii; JW, I.138–9. For incense, balsam, bitumen, and their uses, A. Lucas, Ancient Egyptian Materials and Industries (London: Edward Arnold, 1962).
18. “King of a wilderness”: JA, XIV.484; similarly JW, I.355.
19. “it would be unsafe”: JA, XV.107. Josephus further credits C with the death of Malchus, as with a Syrian king, JW, I.440.
20. “In this way, he said”: Ibid., XV.99–100.
21. “laid a treacherous snare”: Ibid., XV.98 (Whiston translation).
22. “for she was by nature” to “a slave to her lusts”: Ibid., XV.97.
23. “his love would flame up”: Ibid., XV.101.
24. “being against such a woman”: Ibid., XV.101 (Whiston translation).
25. “one night even forced”: JW, I.498. In accusing ND of having recast history, Josephus cites his “false charges of licentiousness” against Mariamme, concocted to justify her unjustifiable murder ( JA, XVI.185).
26. “to make one feel”: Aristeas, The Letter of Aristeas, 99. See also JW, V.231; Philo, “On the Migration of Abraham,” 102–5 for the high priest’s attire.
27. “the offspring of some god” to “she might ask”: JA, XV.26–27.
28. “to use him for erotic purposes”: Ibid., XV.29.
29. “in slavery and fear” to “she possibly could”: Ibid., XV.45–6.
30. “it is right for women”: From “Helen,” in Euripides II, 1969, 325.
31. “hatred of him was as great”: JW, I.437.
32. palace pool: Nielsen, 1999, on Herod’s palaces. Also JA, XV.54–5.
33. “that Herod, who had been appointed”: JA, XV.63.
34. “it was improper” to “charges against him”: Ibid., XV.76–77.
35. “wicked woman”: Ibid., XV.91.
36. “There seems to be some pleasure”: From “The Phoenician Women,” in Euripides V: Electra, The Phoenician Women, The Bacchae, David Grene and Richmond Lattimore, eds; Elizabeth Wyckoff, tr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959), 200.
37. The fortified Masada: JW, VII.300–1.
38. “a ready ear only for slander”: Ibid., I.534.
39. “struck him like a thunderbolt” to “of his life”: Ibid., I.440.
40. C’s intelligence: According to Cicero, a letter took forty-seven days to travel from Cappadocia to Rome.
41. preparing the silver denarii: Andrew Meadows to author, May 24, 2010.
42. “there is no other medicine”: From “The Bacchae,” in Euripides V, 282–3.
43. “an abundance of clothing”: MA, LI. The disgruntled rumor appears both in Plutarch and in Dio, XLIX.xxxi.1.
44. “a yawning and abysmal desert”: Plutarch, “Crassus,” XXII.4. On the pitiful state of A’s men, Florus, II.xx.
45. “For so eager was he”: MA, XXXVII; Livy, “Summaries,” 130.
46. “sharing in the toils”: MA, XLIII.
47. “neither reproached him with his treachery”: Ibid., L.
48. “called for a dark robe”: Ibid., XLIV.
49. “by an extraordinary perversion”: Florus, II.xx. See also VP, II.lxxxii, and Dio, XLIX.32.
50. “Neither in youthfulness nor beauty”: MA, LVII.
51. “her pleasurable society” to “live with him”: Ibid., LIII.
52. “wearing her life away”: Flatterer, 61b.
53. “as long as she could see him”: MA, LIII. For C’s effect even on A’s associates, Dio, L.v.3.
54. a happy subordinate: Dio, XLVIII.xxvii.2.
55. “failed to see”: Flatterer, 61b.
56. “it was an infamous thing”: MA, LIV.
57. “the passion and witchery”: Dio, XLIX.xxxiv.1. For “certain drugs,” MA, XXXVII.
58. “In his endeavor to take vengeance”: Dio, XLIX.xxxix.2.
59. On Artavasdes: Dio, XLIX.xxxx.1–3; VP, II.82.4; MA, L.6; Plutarch, “Crassus,” XXXIII; Livy, “Summaries,” 131. On the triumph that was not a triumph, see Beard, 2007, 266–9.
60. C in her Isis regalia: Ashton, 2008, 138–9; Baudoin Van de Walle, “La Cléopâtre de Mariemont,” Chronique d’Egypte, 24, 1949, 28–9; interview with Branko van Oppen, February 28, 2010.
61. A dressed as Dionysus: VP, II.lxxxii.4.
62. coins minted for the occasion: Buttrey, 1954, 95–109.
63. “the two most magnificent people”: Macurdy, 1932, 205. Bevan, 1968, best describes C’s golden age: For a second time in a decade, she “saw herself within measurable distance of becoming Empress of the world,” 377.
64. The Jews and C’s rule: See W. W. Tarn, “Alexander Helios and the Golden Age,” Journal of Roman Studies 22, II (1932): 142. On the Jews generally in C’s time, Victor Tcherikover, Hellenistic Civilization and the Jews (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1999).
65. said to be busy: Dio, XLIX.xli.6.
66. “theatrical and arrogant”: MA, LIV.3.
67. “a Dionysiac revel”: Huzar, 1985/6, 108.
CHAPTER VIII: ILLICIT AFFAIRS AND BASTARD CHILDREN
On the war of propaganda: Dio, Plutarch, Suetonius. Among modern studies of the surviving evidence, M. P. Charlesworth, “Some Fragments of the Propaganda of Mark Antony,” Classical Quarterly 27, no. 3/4 (1933): 172–7; Joseph Geiger, “An Overlooked Item of the War of Propaganda between Octavian and Antony,” Historia 29 (1980): 112–4; and Kenneth Scott, “The Political Propaganda of 44–30 BC,” Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome XI (1933): 7–49. No one makes sense of the battle of Actium, but John Carter and William Murray come closest. See Murray’s painstaking and ingenious reconstruction of the events in “Octavian’s Campsite Memorial for the Actium War,” in William M. Murray and Photios M. Petsas, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 79, no. 4 (1989): 1–172; and Carter, 1970; as well as in Carter’s notes on the engagement in Cassius Dio: The Roman History (New York: Penguin, 1987), 266. On the battle, the winds, the site, interviews with William Murray, October 14, 2009, and March 3, 2010. See also W. W. Tarn, “The Battle of Actium,” Journal of Roman Studies 21 (1931): 173–99; Casson, 1991. On ND, Plutarch, Table Talk, VIII.iv.723; Bowersock, 1965, 124–5, 134–8; and Mark Toher, “The Terminal Date of Nicolaus’s Universal History,” Ancient History Bulletin 1.6 (1987): 135–8. Angelos Chaniotis is very good on women and warfare, War in the Hellenistic World (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 110ff.
For the Greek stay, the work of Christian Habicht, especially “Athens and the Ptolemies,” Classical Antiquity 11, no. 1 (April 1992): 68–90. Seneca, Suasoriae, 1.7, mentions lampoons against A in Athens.
1. “illicit affairs”: Lucan, X.76. The translation is from Jones, 2006, 66.
2. “For talk is evil”: Hesiod, Works and Days, 760. See also Achilles Tatius, VI.10: Virgil’s Aeneid, IV.240–265: “Slander is sharper than any sword, stronger than fire, more persuasive than a siren; rumor is more slippery than water, runs faster than the wind, flies quicker than any winged bird.”
3. “the abundance that flowed”: Theocritus, Idyll 17 (translation modified).
4. “galleries, libraries”: Philo, “On the Embassy to Gaius,” 151. The translation is from Forster, 2004, 133.
5. “if ever that kingdom”: Diodorus, XXXIII.28b.3.
6. the kind of man you could rely on: JA, XVII.99–100. Also on ND, Plutarch, Table Talk, VIII.iv.723.
7. sea nymph imitation: VP, II.lxxxiii.
8. “All of this I bestow”: MA, XXVIII.
9. The basalt inscription: See P. M. Fraser, “Mark Antony in Alexandria—A Note,” Journal of Roman Studies 47:1–2 (1957): 71–3.
10. The Roman bodyguards: Dio, L.v.1.
11. The tax exemptions: See Peter van Minnen, “An Official Act of Cleopatra,” Ancient Society 30 (2000): 29–34; van Minnen, “Further Thoughts on the Cleopatra Papyrus,” Archiv für Papyrusforschung 47 (2001): 74–80; van Minnen, “A Royal Ordinance of Cleopatra and Related Documents,” Walker and Ashton, 2003, 35–42.
12. “only made them come back”: Ibid., 79.
13. “joined him in the management”: Dio, L.v.1–2.
14. The young Canidius: Plutarch, “Brutus,” III.
15. “disturb the auspicious respect”: Appian, V.144. For Sextus Pompey generally, Appian, V.133–45.
16. A’s numerous misdeeds: Dio, XLVI.x.3.
17. “good fellowship”: MA, XXXII.
18. “a veritable weakling”: Dio, L.xviii.3.
19. According to Suetonius: DA, LXIX. Sejanus was much later said to do the same, “for by maintaining illicit relations with the wives of nearly all the distinguished men, he learned what their husbands were saying and doing,” Dio, LVIII.3.
20. “invidious wealth” to “solid glory”: Cicero, “Philippic,” V, xviii.50.
21. “screwing the queen” to “get it up?”: DA, LXIX. I have borrowed Andrew Meadows’s earthy translation, Walker and Higgs, 2001, 29.
22. “amorous adventures”: Dio, LI.viii.2.
23. On Ephesus: Hopkins, A World Full of Gods (New York: Plume, 2001), 200–205. Strabo, 14.1.24; NH, V.xxxi.15. Craven, 1920, 22, points out that Ephesus was the seat of the Roman proconsul in Asia; the public records and treasury were there. It was a logical business address for A.
24. “By certain documents”: Dio, L.ii.6.
25. “to sail to Egypt”: MA, LVI.
26. Acquiring an empire with money: Plutarch, “Aemilius Paulus,” XII.9.
27. “was inferior in intelligence” to “large affairs”: MA, LVI.
28. “a rabble of Asiatic performers”: MA, XXIV.
29. “And while almost all the world” to “entertainments and gifts”: Ibid., LVI.
30. A as Dionysus: On the power of the mythologies, see H. Jeanmarie, “La politique religieuse d’Antoine et de Cléopâtre,” Revue Archéologique 19 (1924): 241–61.
31. Athenian statue-erecting: Nepos, XXV Atticus, III.2.
32. The Ptolemaic statuary: Pausanias, 1.8.9; Habicht, 1992, 85. NH, 34, 37.
33. “by many splendid gifts”: MA, LVII.
34. The Pergamum library: See Casson, 2001, 48–50. Casson has suggested this was a shrewd way of shrugging off a financial burden. There was no real need for the Pergamum library, in Roman hands already for a century.
35. “Many times, while he was seated”: MA, LVIII.
36. “wanton bits”: Plutarch, “Brutus,” V; “Cato the Younger,” XXIV.
37. “sprang up from his tribunal”: MA, LVIII.
38. kissing his wife in public: Plutarch, “Marcus Cato,” XVII.7.
39. “in compliance with some agreement”: MA, LVIII.
40. what eunuchs did: Dio, L.xxv.2; Horace, Epodes, IX.
41. The divorce: Neal is especially lucid on the subject, 1975, 110.
42. “which had hitherto veiled”: Plutarch, “Pompey,” LIII.
43. “required a sober head” to “scurrilities”: MA, LIX. For Geminius’s heartache, see Plutarch, “Pompey,” II.
44. “Treachery,” it would be said: VP, II.lxxxiii. For the desertions see also Dio, L.iii.2–3; for Dellius’s weakness of heart, Appian, V.50, 55, 144.
45. A’s will: Either Dio has his chronology wrong or we all do: He seems to imply (L.xx.7) that Octavian hunted down the will at least a year earlier, before the Donations, which would entirely change the complexion of that ceremony.
46. “should be borne in state”: MA, LVIII.
47. “honeyballs of phrases”: Petronius, Satyricon, I.
48. the Orient and sex: On the “almost uniform association between the Orient and sex,” its “sexual promise (and threat), untiring sensuality, unlimited desire, deep generative energies,” see Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1994), 188; and Flatterer, 56e. For Flaubert in the mid-nineteenth century, the courtesan of old was “the embracing, strangling viper of the Nile.”
49. “In his hand was a golden scepter”: Florus, II.xxi.11.
50. “bewitched by that accursed woman”: Dio, L.xxvi.5.
51. “Then as his love for Cleopatra”: VP, II.lxxxii.
52. “melts and unmans”: MA, LIII (ML translation).
53. “a slave to his love”: Florus, II.xxi.11; “he gave not a thought”: Dio, XLVIII.xxiii.2; “he was not even a master of himself”: MA, LX. Plutarch on Omphale, “Demetrius and Antony,” III.3.
54. “The Egyptian woman demanded”: Florus, II.xxi.11.
55. “For she so charmed”: Dio, L.v.4.
56. Reports circulated: Strabo accuses A of pillaging the best art he could find for C, from the temples of Samos and elsewhere, 13.1.30, 14.1.14; also NH, XXXIV 8.19.58.
57. “longed with womanly desire”: Eutropius, VII.7.
58. “that the greatest wars”: Athenaeus, XIII.560b. He adds that Egyptian women were known to be “far more amorous than other women.”
59. “I don’t much like”: Plautus, “The Pot of Gold,” 167–9. The translation is from Skinner, 2005, 201.
60. “Would a woman”: Lucan, X.67.
61. A just declaration of war: Livy, 1.32.5–14. On the traditional procedure, Meyer Reinhold, “The Declaration of War against Cleopatra,” Classical Journal 77, no. 2 (1981–2): 97–103; also R. M. Ogilvie, A Commentary on Livy, Books 1–5 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 127–8; and Thomas Wiedemann, “The Fetiales: A Reconsideration,” Classical Quarterly 36, no. 2 (1986): 478–90. It is Wiedemann who speculates that Octavian invented the rite.
62. “had voluntarily taken up”: Dio, L.vi.1.
63. “What in the world does he mean”: Ibid., L.xxi.3.
64. “is at war with me”: Ibid., L.xxi.1.
65. “For I adjudged” to “passed against her”: Ibid., L.xxvi.3.
66. “as a whole far surpassed”: Ibid., L.vi.2–3.
67. “he sought a reputation”: Florus, I.xlv.19.
68. “spying upon and annoying”: Dio, L.xi.1.
69. The Acropolis statues: Ibid., L.viii.1–5, L.xv.3.
70. “Hail Caesar”: Macrobius, Saturnalia, 2.4.29.
71. “desired to be the ruler”: Nepos, “Atticus,” XX.4.
72. A’s status in Egypt: Generally categories were more fluid in Egypt, where Alexander the Great could become a pharaoh, a female ruler could reign as a king, and the divinities tended to run together. Rome preferred clearer distinctions. Not coincidentally, Latin is “much less hospitable than Greek to compound words and neologisms,” Rawson, 2001, 232.
73. One of the greatest twentieth-century classicists: Tarn (and Charlesworth), 1965, 96–7.
74. “we who are Romans”: Dio, L.xxiv.3.
75. “for it is impossible”: Ibid., L.xxvii.4. He could have been quoting Cicero, who railed against a man “debauched, immodest, effeminate, even when in fear never sober,” “Philippic,” III.v.12.
76. “are most wanton”: ND, Fr. 129. On the costly furniture, DA, LXX.
77. in such a contest: Dio, L.xxviii.6.
78. “this pestilence of a woman”: Dio, L.xxiv.5 (Penguin translation).
79. “to conquer and rule” to “equal to a man”: Ibid., L.xxviii.3–4.
80. “What is there dreadful in Caesar’s”: MA, LXII.
81. What does our history mean: Propertius, Elegies, 3.11.47–68. On C as a paltry triumph, Elegies 4.6.64–6. Nourse, 2002, 128, notes that the Greeks perceived “woman as dangerously emotional and destructively petty when allowed access to power.” The magistrate who faces off against Lysistrata in Aristophanes makes a different point. “But men must never, ever be worsted by women!” he cries, handing the baton directly to Lucan and Propertius.
82. infinitely more suitable as a battle site: Dio, L.xii.8.
83. The color of the Actium camp: For the Median vests, Plutarch, “Paulus,” XVIII and XXX–XXXII; the Ptolemaic military cloak comes from Athenaeus, V.196f. According to Sallust, the Armenian army was famed for its gorgeous armor. The decorated arms, Mayor, 2010, 11–12, 206; Walker and Higgs, 2001, 264. Plutarch supplies some description of a military camp in his life of Brutus; Josephus vividly evokes its precision in JW, III.77–102. There is some debate about the Antonia’s purple sails, despite NH, XIX.V, and Casson’s conviction about them, interview of January 26, 2009. William Murray believes they may constitute a literary flourish; interview of March 3, 2010. In any event the ship would have been magnificently carved.
84. “For extravagance in other objects”: Plutarch, “Philopoemen,” IX.3.7.
85. some familiar advice: JW, I.389–90.
86. “May your Lordship”: Cited in Antonia Fraser, The Warrior Queens (New York: Knopf, 1989), 190.
87. A’s officers on C: Suetonius, “Nero,” III; Appian, IV.38.
88. Ahenobarbus and A in Parthia: MA, XL.
89. eating stale bread: Plutarch, “Caius Marius,” VII. He was meant as well to sleep on a simple pallet, which A surely did not do with C in camp.
90. “his ears, it seems”: JW, I.390.
91. “abused by Cleopatra”: MA, LVIII.
92. “The chief task of a good general”: Plutarch, “Agesilaus and Pompey,” IV.
93. A’s distrust of C: NH, 21.12.
94. Dellius’s desertion: VP, II.lxxxiv; Dio, L.xiii.8.
95. blundered grievously: Plutarch, “Pompey,” LXXVI; Appian, II.71. The results were pitiful, JC, XLV.
96. “I have chosen to begin”: Dio, L.xix.5.
97. “For in general”: Ibid., L.iii.2–3.
98. “in miserable logs” to “conquer our enemies or die”: MA, LXIV.
99. “better endowed”: Ibid., XL.
100. “Since, then, they admit”: Dio, L.xxx.3–4.
101. Dio suggests that A fled: Ibid., L.xxxiii.3–4.
102. “he went forward alone” to “eat and sleep together”: MA, LXVII. It is entirely possible that Plutarch invented the sulk, or introduced it prematurely. It may equally well have been retrofitted to the story, along with C’s treachery. See also VP, II.lxxxv.
103. purple and gold spangles: Florus, II.xxi.
104. The floral decorations: Dio, LI.v.4.
105. scale of his victory: Murray, 1989, 142, persuasively argues that before and after Actium Octavian captured some 350 ships, including several equally as large as C’s flagship.
CHAPTER IX: THE WICKEDEST WOMAN IN HISTORY
For C’s final days we are almost exclusively alone with Dio and Plutarch; Eusebius, Eutropius, Horace, Suetonius, and Velleius make ancillary contributions. On Plutarch’s approach to C’s death, Pelling, 2002, is particularly fine, 106ff. See also J. Gwyn Griffiths, “The Death of Cleopatra VII,” Journal of Egyptian Archeology 47 (Dec. 1961): 113–8; Yolande Grisé, Le suicide dans la Rome antique (Montreal: Bellarmin, 1982); Saul Jarcho, “The Correspondence of Morgagni and Lancisi on the Death of Cleopatra,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 43, no. 4 (1969): 299–325; W. R. Johnson, “A Quean, A Great Queen? Cleopatra and the Politics of Misrepresentation,” Arion VI, no. 3 (1967): 387–402; Gabriele Marasco, “Cleopatra e gli esperimenti su cavie umane,” Historia 44 (1995): 317–25. Francesco Sbordone, “La morte di Cleopatra nei medici greci,” Rivista Indo-Greco-Italica 14 (1930): 1–20; T. C. Skeat’s ingenious chronology of C’s end, “The Last Days of Cleopatra,” Journal of Roman Studies 13 (1953): 98–100; Tarn, 1931. On the fates of C’s children, Meiklejohn, 1934.
For a nuanced account of the triumph and the fallout from Actium, see Robert Alan Gurval, Actium and Augustus: The Politics and Emotions of Civil War (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998).
For C’s enduring, evolving image, or how she entered into modern mythology: Mary Hamer, Signs of Cleopatra (London: Routledge, 1993); Lucy Hughes-Hallett, Cleopatra: Histories, Dreams and Distortions (New York: Harper & Row, 1990); Richardine G. Woodall, “Not Know Me Yet? The Metamorphosis of Cleopatra” (PhD dissertation, York University, 2004); Wyke, 2002, 195–320.
1. “The wickedest woman”: Cecil B. DeMille, cited in Michelle Lovric, Cleopatra’s Face (London: British Museum Press, 2001), 83.
2. “I was equal to gods”: Euripides, “Hekabe,” in Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides, Anne Carson, tr. (New York: New York Review of Books, 2006), 371–2.
3. Misfortune, went the saying: Euripides, “Heracles,” in Euripides II, 560.
4. She did not care to watch them: Dio, LI.v.5.
5. “a most bold and wonderful” to “war and slavery”: Plutarch, LXIX (ML translation). For an intriguing take on A and C’s post-Actium plans, see Claude Nicolet’s “Où Antoine et Cléopâtre voulaient-ils aller?,” Semitica 39 (1990): 63–6.
6. the monstrosity of a vessel: Athenaeus, V.203e–204d.
7. The Nabateans: Strabo extends their territory from southern Jordan to the head of the Gulf of Eilat, 16.4.21–6.
8. “every bit of his soul”: JA, XV.190. Similarly if less dramatically, JW, I.388–94. Herod’s cozying up to Octavian looked nobler in retrospect: “And when war had been declared by the Romans on all the monarchs in the world, our kings alone, by reason of their fidelity, remained their allies and friends,” explains Josephus, Against Apion, II, 134.
9. “the new Hannibal”: On Sertorius, Plutarch, “Pompey,” XVII–XIX; Plutarch, “Cato the Younger,” LIX; Dio, LI.viii.6.
10. “without having accomplished anything”: Dio, LI.v.6.
11. Octavian’s assassination: Ibid., LI.vi.4.
12. A’s modest hut: Strabo, 17.1.9.
13. “for he himself also had been wronged”: MA, LXIX.
14. Dio slips in a bitter note: Dio, LI.vii.2–3.
15. “at such a time there is no use”: Flatterer, 69a.
16. “irresistible courage”: Appian, IV.112.
17. “set the whole city”: MA, LXXI (ML translation).
18. “to continue the struggle”: Dio, LI.vi.1.
19. Caesarion was hailed as pharaoh: Walker and Higgs, 2001, 175.
20. “for she hoped that even if”: Dio, LI.vi.6.
21. “amorous adventures” to “might be saved”: Ibid., LI.viii.2–3.
22. rank and file in check: Ibid., LI.iii.4.
23. “a woman who was haughty”: MA, LXXIII.
24. “thought it her due”: Dio, LI.viii.7. To C’s list of Roman conquests, Plutarch offhandedly and illogically adds Cn. Pompey, MA, XXV.4.
25. “to hang him up”: MA, LXXII.
26. “suited to her fallen fortunes” to “went away rich”: Ibid., LXXIII (ML translation).
27. “splendor, luxury, and sumptuosity”: Ibid., LXXI (ML translation).
28. “surpassingly lofty”: Ibid., LXXIV.
29. “that Antony and Cleopatra learned”: Dio, LI.v.2.
30. “realm was far too” and the welcome: JW, I.394–6. See also JA, XV.199–202.
31. “strange, wild life”: Macurdy, 1932, 221.
32. The account of C’s bribery: MA, LXXIV.
33. Octavian storming Pelusium: Dio, LI.ix.5.
34. “she expected to gain”: Ibid., LI.ix.6.
35. “Then, exalted by his victory”: MA, LXXIV.
36. “a mummy and a nothing”: Ibid., LXXV.
37. “that Cleopatra had betrayed”: Ibid., LXXVI (translation modified).
38. Now in a panic, the city: Paulus Orosius, The Seven Books of History Against the Pagans (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1964), 274.
39. “yet in his infatuation”: Dio, LI.x.5–6; Livy, 133.30; MA, LXXVI.
40. “O Cleopatra”: MA, LXXVI (translation modified).
41. “Never” to “speedier release”: Ibid., LXXVII.
42. On Gaius Proculeius: A may not have been entirely misguided about him; Proculeius displayed a remarkable generosity with his brothers, Horace, Ode 2.2. Tacitus (Annals, IV.40) further testifies to his character; Juvenal (Satire VII.94) mentions him as a patron of the arts.
43. “a man who had been his relation” to “in his replies”: MA, LXXVIII.
44. Burning A’s letters: Dio, LII.xlii.8.
45. “add greatly to the glory”: MA, LXXVIII.
46. “yet he was unwilling”: Dio, LI.xi.3.
47. “Wretched Cleopatra” to “ease and pleasure”: MA, LXXIX (translation reworked).
48. “in order that she should entertain”: Dio, LI.xi.5.
49. The massive Caesareum wall: Goudchaux estimates they were between 2.5 and 3.5 meters thick, “Cleopatra’s Subtle Religious Strategy,” in Walker and Higgs, 2001, 136.
50. For more on the ritual lamentations, Branko Fredde van Oppen de Ruiter, “The Religious Identification of Ptolemaic Queens with Aphrodite, Demeter, Hathor and Isis.” (PhD dissertation, The City University of New York, 2007), 274–370.
51. “in sumptuous and royal” to “regarding her children”: MA, LXXXII.
52. “by far the richest”: Orosius, 1964, 274.
53. “inflict any irreparable injury”: Dio, LI.xvi.3–4.
54. “Her hair and face”: MA, LXXXIII.
55. “wonderfully became her”: Dio, LI.xii.1.
56. “for he was well worth beholding”: ND, 5.
57. “To be so long prey”: Cicero to Atticus, 206 (X.14), May 8, 49.
58. “she would lament and kiss” to “even in Hades”: Dio, LI.xii.3–7.
59. “to necessity and fear of Antony”: MA, LXXXIII.
60. throwing herself vigorously at all kinds of feet: Dio has her casting herself at Octavian’s knees, but then again Florus has the same in 48, on CR’s arrival, II.13.56, and again at Octavian’s, II.21.9.
61. “The charm for which she was famous”: MA, LXXXIII.
62. “musical accents” and “melting tones”: Dio, LI.xii.4.
63. “stealing away” to “more gentle?”: MA, LXXXIII (translation reworked).
64. “worse than a thousand deaths”: Dio, LI.xiii.2.
65. “more splendid treatment” to “deceived by her”: MA, LXXXIII.
66. “a certain tenderness” to “apart from you”: Ibid., LXXXIV (translation reworked). Cornelius Dolabella may have been the son of P. Cornelius Dolabella, C’s near-ally of 44–43, Prosopographia Imperii Romani, 2nd edition.
67. “The mischief”: MA, LXXXV. For more on the asp, Nicander, Poems and Poetical Fragments (London: Cambridge University Press, 1953).
68. “her most beautiful apparel”: Dio, LI.xiii.5. Descriptions of the couch and royal emblems, O. E. Kaper to author, March 18, 2010. The crook and flail, interview with Roger Bagnall, May 3, 2010.
69. “A fine deed” to “so many kings”: MA, LXXXV.
70. “Valor in the unfortunate”: Plutarch, “Aemilius Paulus,” XXVI.12. As was said of Alexander the Great’s mother—another suicide—the greatness of the son could be read in the death of the mother.
71. On the psylli: Lucan, IX.920–38; NH, VII.ii.13–5. Also Plutarch, “Cato the Younger,” LVI.3–4; Dio, LI.xiv.4.
72. Even Strabo: Strabo, 17.1.10.
73. “The truth of the matter”: MA, LXXXVI.
74. “sharp-toothed serpents”: Horace, Ode I.37.
75. “Cleopatra cheated the vigilance”: VP, II.lxxxvii (translation reworked).
76. both the date and the time: DA, L.
77. Instead he boasted: AA, 4.
78. “vexed at the death” to “lofty spirit”: MA, LXXXVI.
79. “excessively grieved”: Dio, LI.xiv.6.
80. “No craven woman”: Horace, Ode I.37 (Louis E. Lord translation).
81. “with royal splendor”: MA, LXXXVI (Modern Library translation).
82. The statues of Iras and Charmion: Lindsay, 1998, 337.
83. Cleopatra Selene’s crocodiles: NH, 5.51.
84. Ptolemy’s murder: Suetonius, “Caligula,” XXXV; Dio, LIX.25. For an intricate, speculative account of the death, Jean-Claude Faur, “Caligula et la Maurétanie: La fin de Ptolémée,” Klio 55 (1973): 249–71.
85. The death of A’s associates: Orosius, 1964, 274.
86. On Caligula’s alternate views: Dio, LIX.xx.1–2; Suetonius, “Caligula,” XXIII.1.
87. devotion was the talk of Alexandria: See Hölbl, 2001, 249.
88. Octavian and the Alexander mummy: DA, XVIII; Dio, LI.xvi.5.
89. “the common terror”: Gallus dedication of April 15, 29, cited in Robert K. Sherk, Rome and the Greek East to the Death of Augustus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 94.
90. “in costliness and magnificence”: Dio, LI.xxi.7–8. On the children, Eusebius, 187–94.
91. a lumbering hippopotamus: Gurval, 1998, 29.
92. “the Roman empire was enriched”: Dio, LI.xvii.8. NH for the obelisk, XXXVI.xiv.70–1.
93. On the Egyptomania: Carla Alfano, “Egyptian Influences in Italy,” in Walker and Higgs, 2001, 286–8. Earlier, Cicero (De Legibus, II.2) had heaped scorn on Rome’s fashionable faux-Egyptian landscapes. Future Roman emperors would embrace Egyptian culture as Octavian did not; see René Preys, “Les empereurs romains vus de l’Egypte,” in Les Empereurs du Nil (Leuven, Belgium: Editions Peeters, 2000), 30–3.
94. a golden age of women: See Reinhold, 1988, 72; Kleiner and Matheson, 1996, 36–9.
95. Livia’s status: Dio, LVII.12. For good modern accounts, Anthony A. Barrett, Livia: First Lady of Imperial Rome (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002); Ruth Bertha Hoffsten, “Roman Women of Rank of the Early Empire in Public Life as Portrayed by Dio, Paterculus, Suetonius, and Tacitus” (PhD dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1939). On Livia’s staff, Balsdon, 1962, 93, 276. Kleiner, 2005, 251–7, has Livia deliberately modeling her ascent on C.
96. The melted tableware: DA, LXXI. And, professes Dio, Octavian kept none of C’s furnishings save for “a single agate cup.”
97. “For it is fitting”: Dio, LII.xxx.1–2. C was even outdone as a consumer of pearls. Lollia Paulina, Caligula’s third wife, was said to have appeared at a banquet “covered with emeralds and pearls interlaced alternately and shining all over her head, hair, ears, neck and fingers, the sum total amounting to the value of 40,000,000 sesterces.” That was four times the price of C’s pearl, and Lollia stood ready to offer up the receipts to prove it, NH, IX.lviii.
98. the whisper about Livia: Tacitus, Annals, I.10.
99. “that no high position”: Dio, LV.xv.1–2.
100. “Validity was restored”: VP, II.lxxxix.
101. “from a most grievous danger”: J.H.C. Williams, “ ‘Spoiling the Egyptians’: Octavian and Cleopatra,” in Walker and Higgs, 2001, 197.
102. Tiberius’s scoff: Dio, LVII.xviii.2.
103. “How much more attention”: Brutus to Cicero, 25 (I.16).
104. “A man who teaches a woman”: Menander, cited in Lefkowitz and Fant, 1992, 31.
105. “ancient writers repeatedly speak”: The author of the pornographic piece is uncertain, Hughes-Hallett, 1991, 68.
106. “she often played the prostitute”: Propertius, Elegies, 3.11.30. Skinner points out that the famous prostitute, denounced for her greed and celebrated for her wit, already constituted a familiar trope in history and biography, 2005, 167.
107. “many men bought nights”: Aurelius Victor, De Viris Illistribus, 86.2. With “Egyptian Nights,” Pushkin enthusiastically took off from there.
108. “a dazzling piece of witchcraft”: Anna Jameson, Memoirs of Celebrated Female Sovereigns (New York: Harper, 1836), 55.
109. “that disgusting Cleopatra”: Nightingale’s January 1850 letter, cited in Vallée, 2003, 244. C’s crime was to have immortalized herself—and Caesarion—with the carvings at Hermonthis. In The Way We Live Now, Trollope’s irrepressible Matilde Carbury airily sums up C’s career with “What a wench she was!” Lady Carbury is energetically flogging her new volume, Criminal Queens.
110. “How would you like”: Cecil B. DeMille, in Lovric, 2001, 83.
111. “wily and suspicious”: Plutarch, “Pompey,” LXX.4 (translation reworked). The marriages are “tricks of state” in the ML edition, “suspicious and deceptive” partnerships in the Loeb. As Alexander the Great’s repeatedly wed father had discovered, marriage was much cheaper than war.
112. “who had already ruined”: MA, LXVI. She comes in for the worst abuse from Josephus, who nearly hyperventilates enumerating her crimes, Against Apion, II, 57–9: C “committed every kind of iniquity and crime against her relatives, her devoted husbands [sic], the Romans in general, and their emperors, her benefactors; who slew her innocent sister Arsinoe in the temple, treacherously assassinated her brother, plundered her country’s gods and her ancestors’ sepulchers; who, owing her throne to the first Caesar, dared to revolt against his son and successor, and, corrupting Antony by sensual passion, made him an enemy to his country and faithless to his friends, robbing some of their royal rank, discharging others, and driving them into crime.”
113. mother of Christ: See Jack Lindsay, Mark Antony: His World and His Contemporaries (London: Routledge, 1936), 231.
114. “the most illustrious and wise”: Chronicle of John, Bishop of Nikiu, 67.5–10. Cited in Lindsay, 1998, 333. He nominates C as the greatest of the Ptolemies, though also credits her with achievements not her own.
115. a rollicking tribute to guilt-free middle-aged adultery: René Weis, Decoding a Hidden Life: Shakespeare Unbound (New York: Holt, 2007), 355–8. Weis notes that Shakespeare was forty-three while working on the play. So is A as the curtain rises.
116. Blame Shakespeare: Antony and Cleopatra was itself written off as indecent through much of the nineteenth century. Although it includes what many consider Shakespeare’s best female role, the play is famously lacking in fine productions and in admirers. In 1938 Somerset Maugham offered an explanation for its unpopularity: “Audiences have felt that it was contemptible to throw away an empire for a woman’s sake. Indeed if it were not founded on an accepted legend they would be unanimous in asserting that such a thing was incredible” (The Summing Up [Garden City: Doubleday, 1938], 138–9). A and C’s grand and hopeless passion is lost on the British, who were “not an amorous race,” and generally, in Maugham’s view, one disgusted by sex. They did not ruin themselves for a woman. Which may or may not explain why the play was the favorite of Emily Dickinson; see Judith Farr, “Emily Dickinson’s ‘Engulfing’ Play: Antony and Cleopatra,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 9, no. 2 (1990): 231–50. Samuel Johnson and William Hazlitt too gave the play mixed grades; Johnson found it overblown and carelessly constructed. It gave George Bernard Shaw dyspepsia. Coleridge alone ranked Antony and Cleopatra among Shakespeare’s greatest.
117. “What woman, what ancient succession”: Cited in Hebert W. Benario, “The ‘Carmen de Bello Actiaco’ and Early Imperial Epic,” Aufsteig und Niedergang der römischen Welt II, 30.3 (1983): 1661. For more on that fragment, see Bastien Pestel, “Le ‘De Bello Actiaco,’ ou l’épopée de Cléopâtre” (MA thesis, Université de Laval, 2005).
118. “What is it to lose” to “worse than people say”: Euripides, “The Phoenician Women,” in Euripides V, 388–90.
119. “who destroyed the Egyptian monarchy”: Athenaeus, VI.229c (translation reworked). A generation and a half after C’s death, Philo reflected on the impermanence of wealth and power. His own country offered a prime example, On Joseph, 135–6: “Egypt had once the supreme authority over many nations, but now it is a slave…. Where is the house of the Ptolemies, and the glory of the individual successors of Alexander which at one time shone over all the bounds both of earth and sea?” C had been the last of that line.