Plutarch,
Lives,
“Caesar”
Pompey
Plutarch,
Lives,
“Pompey”
Quintilian
Quintilian,
The Orator’s Education
Strabo
Strabo,
Geography
DA
Suetonius,
The Deified Augustus
(
Lives of the Caesars
)
DJ
Suetonius,
The Deified Julius
(
Lives of the Caesars
)
Valerius
Valerius Maximus,
Memorable Doings and Sayings
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 privee dans l’Egypte ptolemaique (Wroclaw, Poland: Wydawnictwo Polskiej Akademii Nauk, 1969).
For modern accounts of Alexandria: Pascale Ballet’s very good La vie quotidienne a 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: Andre 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,” Mieczyslaw Rodziewicz, “Ptolemaic
