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: Societe 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,” Latomus 30 (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
