Cleopatra

by Stacy Schiff

Cleopatra was arguably doing more to unite East and West than had anyone since Alexander the Great. The sun and the moon figured in the Parthian king’s title; Cleopatra may have been sending him a message. Surely there was no better way to inaugurate a golden age than with a sun god. We know nothing of Antony’s reaction to the news but Octavian’s would have been yet more interesting. In some roundabout way, Cleopatra had seen to it that the two men were, by way of her children, again related. She did not have to broadcast word of the sensational births. News that the enterprising queen of Egypt had borne a son named Alexander—whose father was Mark Antony and whose half brother was a child of Caesar—constituted a banner headline in 39 BC. It was enough to make Cleopatra, to borrow a much later phrase, an object of gossip for the whole world.