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“Man’s most valuable trait is a judicious sense of what not to believe.” —EURIPIDES
We remember her too for the wrong reasons. A capable, clear-eyed sovereign, she knew how to build a fleet, suppress an insurrection, control a currency, alleviate a famine. An eminent Roman general vouched for her grasp of military affairs. Even at a time when women rulers were no rarity she stood out, the sole female of the ancient world to rule alone and to play a role in Western affairs. She was incomparably richer than anyone else in the Mediterranean. And she enjoyed greater prestige than any other woman of her age, as an excitable rival king was reminded when he called, during her stay
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“Dead men don’t bite” was the irrefutable counsel of Theodotus, the rhetoric teacher, who—having proved by simple syllogism that they could afford neither to befriend nor offend Pompey—delivered the line with a smile.
Generally it was known to be impossible to converse with her without being instantly captivated by her.
Plutarch clearly notes that her beauty “was not in itself so remarkable that none could be compared with her, or that no one could see her without being struck by it.” It was rather the “contact of her presence, if you lived with her, that was irresistible.” Her personality and manner, he insists, were no less than “bewitching.”
Apollodorus
The name of the friend who carried her to Caesar's Alexandria residence in a sack.
The best that can be said of the Alexandrian War is that Caesar acquitted himself brilliantly in a situation in which he stupidly found himself.
In the continuation of Caesar’s narrative, Cleopatra appears precisely once. At war’s end he bestows the throne of Egypt upon her, because she “had remained loyal to him, and stayed within his lines.” Cleopatra goes down in Caesar’s history for one reason alone: she was good and obedient.
To it she brought generations’ worth of wisdom. Teething trouble? The standard cure was to feed the child a fried mouse. Excessive crying? A paste of fly dirt and poppy could be counted on to silence the most miserable of infants.
The Ptolemaic system has been compared to that of Soviet Russia; it stands among the most closely controlled economies in history.
In the process, they were especially and frequently exhorted to disseminate throughout Egypt the reassuring message that “nobody is allowed to do what he wishes, but that everything is arranged for the best.”
That fall a giraffe made its first appearance in Rome, to electrifying effect. It may well have sailed north with Cleopatra. (The description-defying creature was “like a camel in all respects”—except for its spots, its soaring height, its legs, and its neck.)
“No one dances while he is sober,” offered Cicero, the greatest of Roman killjoys, “unless he happens to be a lunatic.”
Gulping down his envy with a bracing chaser of contempt, a Roman in Egypt found himself less awed than offended. He wrote off extravagance as detrimental to body and mind, sounding like no one so much as Mark Twain resisting the siren call of Europe.
Not only was a Roman woman without political or legal rights, but she was without a personal name; she carried only the one derived from her father. Caesar had two sisters, both named Julia.
Fashion paused to acknowledge her presence; Cleopatra set off a brief vogue for an elaborate hairstyle, in which rows of braids were knotted cornrow-style and caught in a bun behind the head.
Dio does not mince words either regarding Cicero: “He was the greatest boaster alive.” The vanity extended most of all to his library, arguably the real love of Cicero’s life. It is difficult to name anything in which he took more pleasure, aside possibly from evasion of the sumptuary laws. Cicero liked to believe himself wealthy. He prided himself on his books. He needed no further reason to dislike Cleopatra: intelligent women who had better libraries than he did offended him on three counts.
And was it really necessary for her to act regally? He sniffed that she comported herself like a queen, an offense to his republican sensibilities, no doubt all the more so for his undistinguished birth. Here he had a point. He was not the last to note Cleopatra’s high-handedness. Strategy came more naturally to her than did diplomacy. She may have been tactless; megalomania ran in the family. She had no trouble reminding those around her that—as she would assert later—she had for many years governed a vast kingdom by herself. Disdain is a natural condition of the mind in exile; Cleopatra had
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As for the catalogue of portents, they are impeccable only in retrospect. They might at the time have added up to any number of futures; ancient history is oddly short on incorrect omens. Only later were the unmistakable signs fitted to the occasion, compiled by men who happened to believe Caesar’s murder as much justified as preordained.
The explanations similarly piled up later, history being a kind of omen-in-reverse enterprise.
IN A LIFE of barely salvaged, emotionally overblown scenes, the 44 return to Alexandria is the one that got away, also the most opera-ready. No librettist has touched it, possibly because there is no text. For a woman who was to be celebrated for her masterly manipulation of Rome, Cleopatra’s story would be entrusted primarily to that city’s historians; she effectively ceases to exist without a Roman in the room.
She vigorously embraced her role as Isis, with full emphasis on her maternal command, a novel instance of coaxing a promotion from childbearing.
The Talmud hails her for her “great scientific curiosity” and as “very interested in the experiments of doctors and surgeons.”
Cleopatra’s abilities were great, but the fertile male fancy incontestably greater.
“The greatest achievement for a woman is to be as seldom as possible spoken of.” —THUCYDIDES
Mariamme, the cool, exceptionally beautiful wife who had married him as a teenager, and who, to his frustration, somehow could never get past the fact that Herod had murdered half of her family.
Actium.
Later she sent Octavian a golden scepter, crown, and throne. She would abdicate in exchange for clemency, suggests Dio, “for she hoped that even if he did hate Antony, he would yet take pity on her at least.” Antony hoped to be allowed to live as a private citizen in Egypt or—if that was asking too much—in Athens. Octavian had no time for Antony’s proposal but he answered Cleopatra. Publicly he threatened her. Privately he replied that he would be perfectly reasonable with her on one condition: she was to arrange for Antony’s execution, or at the very least his exile. (Octavian kept the
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Antony. He proposed something else as well. He would kill himself “if in that way Cleopatra might be saved.”
Octavian could not truly expect Cleopatra to murder Antony. Her brother had won no points for eliminating the distressed and defeated Pompey seventeen years earlier. Nor had she any guarantee that Octavian would honor his end of the bargain.
Cleopatra too had plenty on her mind but before all else humored Antony. It was difficult to say what value he added to the equation at this juncture, which makes her solicitude all the more remarkable.
Angrily one of Octavian’s men exploded: “A fine deed this, Charmion!” She had just the energy to offer a parting shot. With a tartness that would have made her mistress proud, she managed, “It is indeed most fine, and befitting the descendant of so many kings,” before collapsing in a heap, at her queen’s side. Charmion’s was an epitaph no one could dispute. (Nor could it be improved upon. Shakespeare used it verbatim.)
Virgil composed the Aeneid in the decade after Cleopatra’s death; he put snakes in her wake even at Actium.
(Menander’s fourth-century adage—“A man who teaches a woman to write should recognize that he is providing poison to an asp”—was still being copied out by schoolchildren hundreds of years after her death.)
Josephus provides descriptions of Herod’s temple and palace in JW, V.173–225; C’s could only have been more opulent.
We know nothing of Arsinoe’s motives, which has not discouraged even the best modern interpreter of the Alexandrian War from speculation: Had she not felt jealous of her older sister’s masterful seduction of Caesar, asserts one historian, “She would not have been a woman.”
In this footnote Schiff is throwing shade at this historian, whoever he (I presume he's a he) is.
On one contemporary list Cleopatra appears as the twenty-second richest person in history, well behind John D. Rockefeller and Tsar Nicholas II, but ahead of Napoleon and J. P. Morgan. She is assigned a net worth of $95.8 billion, or more than three Queen Elizabeth IIs. It is of course impossible accurately to convert currencies across eras.
Many have marveled at the tale, but only one man has sacrificed Tiffany pearls to a laboratory investigation of it. Does a pearl actually disintegrate in vinegar? Yes, if very slowly, reported B. L. Ullman, who in the end resorted to heat to nudge his 1956 experiment along: “When I boiled a pearl for 33 minutes the vinegar boiled off while I was reading a detective story. I can still smell that vinegar. The pearl seemed not to be affected, though I thought it looked a trifle peaked.” He got better results with stronger vinegar, the best results with pulverized pearl, which dissolved after
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The problem (aside from the obvious) with using pearls dissolved in vinegar as an antacid is that vinegar itself is an acid. When you dissolve the pearl in vinegar, you nullify its antacidy.
There was plenty of precedent for this brand of inexactitude. Alexander the Great threw a festival to celebrate his conquest of India, which doubtless surprised the bedraggled, half-starved men who had barely survived that mission, having accomplished no such thing. * This happened by necessity in the best of families, Plutarch assures us, monarchy being “so utterly unsociable a thing.” The rules for dispensing with fellow royals were, he held, as inflexible as those of geometry.
In the normal course of events he would have been preparing to depose his mother about now.
Caesarion, at age 16.
She may well have known Aesop’s fable: As the Lion said to the Man, “There are many statues of men slaying lions, but if only the lions were sculptors there might be quite a different set of statues.”
I'll have to see if that's a Goodreads quote, and add it to my quotes if it is.
