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Cleopatra unsettles more as sage than as seductress; it is less threatening to believe her fatally attractive than fatally intelligent.
She elicited scorn and envy in equal and equally distorting measure; her story is constructed as much of male fear as fantasy.
the Virgin Mary, would subsume Isis as entirely as Elizabeth Taylor has subsumed Cleopatra.
Florence Nightingale was among those who marveled at the parallels between the Osiris and Christ stories. In Upper Egypt she sat spellbound through a Sunday morning in an Isis temple, one largely decorated by Cleopatra’s father. Few places had felt to her so sacred: “I cannot describe to you the feeling at Philae,” she wrote her family in 1850. “The myths of Osiris are so typical of our Saviour that it seemed to me as if I were coming to a place where He had lived—like going to Jerusalem; and when I saw a shadow in the moonlight in the temple court, I thought, ‘perhaps I shall see him: now he
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