Cleopatra: A Life

61. “Otherwise he wouldn’t be so good”: Plutarch citing Antisthenes, “Pericles,” I.5.

62. “not a real man”: Athenaeus, V.206d.

63. “superficially civilized”: Lucan, in P. F. Widdows’s translation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 544.

64. “the last word”: Casson, 1998, 104.

65. “idle and foolish”: NH, XXXVI.xvi.75. In the Loeb, “They rank as a superfluous and foolish display of wealth.”

66. Greek and Latin: Quintilian acknowledges that the world sounded harsher in Latin, shorn as it was of the sweetest Greek letters, with which “the language at once seems to brighten us up and smile” (12.10).

67. word… for “not possessing”: Seneca, Epistle LXXXVII.40.

68. “gold-inlay utensils”: Dalby, 2000, 123. Dalby notes that a Greek accent alone carried with it a whiff of luxury, 122. Similarly Dio, LVII.xv.3; Valerius, Book IX, 1, “Of Luxury and Lust.” It seemed impossible to describe excess without recourse to Greek. It is Dalby who observes that “the classic practical manual of sexual behavior was in Greek, 123.

69. On the rise of luxury: Livy, 39.6; NH, XXXVI; Plutarch, “Caius Marius,” 34; Athenaeus, XII; Horace, Odes II, xv; Dalby, 2000; Wiseman, 1985, 102ff.

70. The stolen napkins: Catullus, Poems, 12 and 25; NH, 19.2.

71. the beautiful vase of poisonous snakes: Saint Jerome, cited in Jasper Griffin, “Virgil Lives!,” New York Review of Books ( June 26, 2008): 24.

72. Women in Rome: Richard A. Bauman, Women and Politics in Ancient Rome (London: Routledge, 1992); Diana E. E. Kleiner and Susan B. Matheson, eds., I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery, 1996); Barbara S. Lesko, “Women’s Monumental Mark on Ancient Egypt,” Biblical Archeologist 54, no. 1 (1991), 4–15; Rawson, 1985; Marilyn B. Skinner’s fine Sexuality in Greek and Roman Culture (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005); Wyke, The Roman Mistress (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). Interview with Larissa Bonfante, February 2, 2009.

73. “Hard work”: Juvenal, Satire 6, 289ff.

74. “teasing, scolding”: Samuel Butler, The Humour of Homer, and Other Essays (London: A. C. Fifield, 1913), 60. Edith Hamilton remarks on the absence of deceived husbands in The Roman Way (New York: Norton, 1993), 35.

75. “There’s nothing a woman”: Juvenal, Satire 6, 460–1.

76. even C’s eunuchs were rich: Seneca, Epistle LXXXVII.16.

77. The much-discussed pearls: Suetonius, “Caligula,” XXXVII; Horace, Satire 2.iii.239; Pausanias, 8.18.6; NH, IX.lviii. C’s two pearls—“the largest in the whole of history”—are from Pliny, IX.119–121. Lucan too ropes a fortune in pearls around C’s neck and through her hair, X.139–40. See also Macrobius, The Saturnalia, 3.17.14. In that much later account C and MA arrive at a wager over the pearl in the course of their extravagant feasting. They are well matched; “It was as the slave of this gluttony that he [MA] wished to make an Egyptian kingdom of the empire of Rome.” Plancus good-naturedly umpires the contest. For centuries C’s name remained a synonym for extravagance. In the fifth century AD Sidonius (Letter VIII.xii.8) described the most lavish of dinners as akin to “a feast of Cleopatra’s.”

78. “When I boiled a pearl”: B. L. Ullman, “Cleopatra’s Pearls,” Classical Journal 52, no. 5 (1957): 196. See also Prudence J. Jones, “The Cleopatra Cocktail,” 1999, http://www.apaclassics.org/AnnualMeeting/99mtg/abstracts/jonesp.html. She finds the pearls do dissolve. Keats included the melted pearls in “Modern Love.”

79. “the leaves at the top”: Hesiod, Works and Days, 680–1.

80. “did not let” to “name to the child”: DJ, LII.2.

81. “was her best card”: Aly, 1989, 51.

82. needed to press her case: Interview with Roger Bagnall, November 11, 2008.

83. passionate, admiring letters: Dio, LI.xii.3.

84. “A more raffish assemblage”: Cicero to Atticus, 16 (I.16.), early July 61. On broadening C’s base of support, Andrew Meadows to author, March 5, 2010.

85. On C’s concern with the reorganization of the East: Gruen, 2003, 271.

CHAPTER V: MAN IS BY NATURE A POLITICAL CREATURE

Generally on Rome’s political climate, Appian, Dio, Florus, Nicolaus of Damascus, Plutarch, Suetonius, and most eloquently, as always, Cicero. On Cicero, Plutarch, and Suetonius: for modern portraits, Everitt, 2003; and Elizabeth Rawson, Cicero: A Portrait (London: Bristol Classical Press, 2001). On the rain of honors, Appian, Cicero, Dio. For the geography of unlit Rome, the Janiculum Hill, etc.: Homo, 1951; Aly, 1989. On C and science, Monica Green, “The Transmission of Ancient Theories of Female Physiology and Disease through the Early Middle Ages” (Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University, 1985), 156–61, 185–9; Albert Neuberger, The Technical Arts and Sciences of the Ancients (London: Kegan Paul, 2003); Margaret Ott, “Cleopatra VII: Stateswoman or Strumpet?” (MA thesis, University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire, 1976); Okasha El Daly, “ ‘The Virtuous Scholar’: Queen Cleopatra in Medieval Muslim Arab Writings,” in Walker and Ashton, 2003, 51–6.

For the traditional Ides: Ovid, Fasti, iii, 523; Martial, Epigrams, IV.64. For the Ides of 44: Appian, II.111–119; Dio, XLIV; Florus, II.xiii.95; ND, 25.92, Fr. 130.19ff; JC, LXVI–LXVII; Plutarch, “Brutus,” XIV–XVIII; MA, XIII–XIV; DJ, LXXXII; VP, LVI. Cicero provides the earliest details, De Divinatione, II.ix.23. See also Balsdon, “The Ides of March,” Historia 7 (1958): 80–94; Nicholas Horsfall, “The Ides of March: Some New Problems,” Greece & Rome 21, no. 2 (1974): 191–99.

1. “Man is by nature”: Aristotle, Politics, I.1253a.

2. “O would that the female sex”: Euripides, “Cyclops,” in Euripides: Cyclops, Alcestis, Medea, David Kovacs, ed., tr. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), 185.

3. “I don’t know how a man”: Cicero to M. Curius, 200 (XII.28), c. August 46.

4. “general perturbation”: Cicero to Rufus, 203 (IV.4), c. October 46.

5. “endless armed conflict”: Cicero to A. Torquatus, 245 (VI.2), April 45.

6. C’s fashion: On the hairstyle, Peter Higgs, “Searching for Cleopatra’s Image: Classical Portraits in Stone,” in Walker and Higgs, 2001, 203. On contemporary Egyptomania, Carla Alfano, “Egyptian Influences in Italy,” Ibid., 276–91. See also Kleiner, 2005, 277–8.

7. “neither a chatterbox”: Aulus Gellius, citing Varro, in The Attic Nights, XIII.xi.2– 5. The translation is from Balsdon, 1969, 46.

8. chicken or the egg: For the dinner discussions, Plutarch, Table Talk (Quaestiones Convivales), II.3 (635)–V.9 (684).

9. “He was not at all concerned”: Dio, XLIII.xxviii.1.

10. “a great deal of barking”: Ibid., XLVI.xxvi.2.

11. “I knew no security” to “treachery of old ones”: Cicero to Cn. Plancius, 240 (IV.14), c. late 46.

12. “of a literary kind”: Cicero to Atticus, 393.2 (XV.15), c. June 44.

13. “blood nor spirit”: Cicero, De Lege Agraria, II.42.xvii (traslation modified).

14. whiff of dishonor: Cicero to Atticus, 25 (II.5), c. April 59.

15. “The arrogance of the Queen”: Cicero to Atticus, 393 (XV.15), c. June 13, 44.

16. “a certain foolish vanity”: Ibid., 38 (II.17), c. June 59.

17. Plutarch was more explicit: Plutarch, “Demosthenes and Cicero,” II.1.

18. “He was the greatest boaster”: Dio, XXXVIII.xii.7.

19. governed a vast kingdom: MA, LVI.

20. It bothered Cicero: As he put it in a summer 50 letter to Atticus, 117 (VI.3): “I have never put up with rudeness from the most powerful personages.”

21. “rescue almost from the brink”: Attributed to Sallust, “Letter to Caesar,” XIII.5.

22. “was impossible to terrify”: Appian, II.150.