Cleopatra: A Life

cedar, 14.5.3.

12. The disapproving Plutarch: MA, XXXVI.

13. Sixteenth regnal year: By our count it would be fifteen; the ancients had no zero.

14. “It seems to me”: Bingen, 1999, 120.

15. Even Plutarch could not call it a mistake: Plutarch, “Demetrius and Antony,” I.2. He recoiled from A’s marriage to C, “although she was a woman who surpassed in power and splendour all the royalties of her time” excepting only—as Plutarch saw it—the Parthian king.

16. A’s attachment to women: Appian, V.76. Dio, XLVIII.xxiv.2–3 has A falling head over heels for C.

17. On Jericho: Strabo, 16.1.15; Justin, 36.iii.1–7; Florus, I.xl.29–30; JW, I.138–9; JW, IV.451–75; HN, XII.111–24; Diodorus, II.xlviii; JW, I.138–9. For incense, balsam, bitumen, and their uses, A. Lucas, Ancient Egyptian Materials and Industries (London: Edward Arnold, 1962).

18. “King of a wilderness”: JA, XIV.484; similarly JW, I.355.

19. “it would be unsafe”: JA, XV.107. Josephus further credits C with the death of Malchus, as with a Syrian king, JW, I.440.

20. “In this way, he said”: Ibid., XV.99–100.

21. “laid a treacherous snare”: Ibid., XV.98 (Whiston translation).

22. “for she was by nature” to “a slave to her lusts”: Ibid., XV.97.

23. “his love would flame up”: Ibid., XV.101.

24. “being against such a woman”: Ibid., XV.101 (Whiston translation).

25. “one night even forced”: JW, I.498. In accusing ND of having recast history, Josephus cites his “false charges of licentiousness” against Mariamme, concocted to justify her unjustifiable murder ( JA, XVI.185).

26. “to make one feel”: Aristeas, The Letter of Aristeas, 99. See also JW, V.231; Philo, “On the Migration of Abraham,” 102–5 for the high priest’s attire.

27. “the offspring of some god” to “she might ask”: JA, XV.26–27.

28. “to use him for erotic purposes”: Ibid., XV.29.

29. “in slavery and fear” to “she possibly could”: Ibid., XV.45–6.

30. “it is right for women”: From “Helen,” in Euripides II, 1969, 325.

31. “hatred of him was as great”: JW, I.437.

32. palace pool: Nielsen, 1999, on Herod’s palaces. Also JA, XV.54–5.

33. “that Herod, who had been appointed”: JA, XV.63.

34. “it was improper” to “charges against him”: Ibid., XV.76–77.

35. “wicked woman”: Ibid., XV.91.

36. “There seems to be some pleasure”: From “The Phoenician Women,” in Euripides V: Electra, The Phoenician Women, The Bacchae, David Grene and Richmond Lattimore, eds; Elizabeth Wyckoff, tr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959), 200.

37. The fortified Masada: JW, VII.300–1.

38. “a ready ear only for slander”: Ibid., I.534.

39. “struck him like a thunderbolt” to “of his life”: Ibid., I.440.

40. C’s intelligence: According to Cicero, a letter took forty-seven days to travel from Cappadocia to Rome.

41. preparing the silver denarii: Andrew Meadows to author, May 24, 2010.

42. “there is no other medicine”: From “The Bacchae,” in Euripides V, 282–3.

43. “an abundance of clothing”: MA, LI. The disgruntled rumor appears both in Plutarch and in Dio, XLIX.xxxi.1.

44. “a yawning and abysmal desert”: Plutarch, “Crassus,” XXII.4. On the pitiful state of A’s men, Florus, II.xx.

45. “For so eager was he”: MA, XXXVII; Livy, “Summaries,” 130.

46. “sharing in the toils”: MA, XLIII.

47. “neither reproached him with his treachery”: Ibid., L.

48. “called for a dark robe”: Ibid., XLIV.

49. “by an extraordinary perversion”: Florus, II.xx. See also VP, II.lxxxii, and Dio, XLIX.32.

50. “Neither in youthfulness nor beauty”: MA, LVII.

51. “her pleasurable society” to “live with him”: Ibid., LIII.

52. “wearing her life away”: Flatterer, 61b.

53. “as long as she could see him”: MA, LIII. For C’s effect even on A’s associates, Dio, L.v.3.

54. a happy subordinate: Dio, XLVIII.xxvii.2.

55. “failed to see”: Flatterer, 61b.

56. “it was an infamous thing”: MA, LIV.

57. “the passion and witchery”: Dio, XLIX.xxxiv.1. For “certain drugs,” MA, XXXVII.

58. “In his endeavor to take vengeance”: Dio, XLIX.xxxix.2.

59. On Artavasdes: Dio, XLIX.xxxx.1–3; VP, II.82.4; MA, L.6; Plutarch, “Crassus,” XXXIII; Livy, “Summaries,” 131. On the triumph that was not a triumph, see Beard, 2007, 266–9.

60. C in her Isis regalia: Ashton, 2008, 138–9; Baudoin Van de Walle, “La Cleopatre de Mariemont,” Chronique d’Egypte, 24, 1949, 28–9; interview with Branko van Oppen, February 28, 2010.

61. A dressed as Dionysus: VP, II.lxxxii.4.

62. coins minted for the occasion: Buttrey, 1954, 95–109.

63. “the two most magnificent people”: Macurdy, 1932, 205. Bevan, 1968, best describes C’s golden age: For a second time in a decade, she “saw herself within measurable distance of becoming Empress of the world,” 377.

64. The Jews and C’s rule: See W. W. Tarn, “Alexander Helios and the Golden Age,” Journal of Roman Studies 22, II (1932): 142. On the Jews generally in C’s time, Victor Tcherikover, Hellenistic Civilization and the Jews (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1999).

65. said to be busy: Dio, XLIX.xli.6.

66. “theatrical and arrogant”: MA, LIV.3.

67. “a Dionysiac revel”: Huzar, 1985/6, 108.

CHAPTER VIII: ILLICIT AFFAIRS AND BASTARD CHILDREN

On the war of propaganda: Dio, Plutarch, Suetonius. Among modern studies of the surviving evidence, M. P. Charlesworth, “Some Fragments of the Propaganda of Mark Antony,” Classical Quarterly 27, no. 3/4 (1933): 172–7; Joseph Geiger, “An Overlooked Item of the War of Propaganda between Octavian and Antony,” Historia 29 (1980): 112–4; and Kenneth Scott, “The Political Propaganda of 44– 30 BC,” Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome XI (1933): 7–49. No one makes sense of the battle of Actium, but John Carter and William Murray come closest. See Murray’s painstaking and ingenious reconstruction of the events in “Octavian’s Campsite Memorial for the Actium War,” in William M. Murray and Photios M. Petsas, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 79, no. 4 (1989): 1–172; and Carter, 1970; as well as in Carter’s notes on the engagement in Cassius Dio: The Roman History (New York: Penguin, 1987), 266. On the battle, the winds, the site, interviews with William Murray, October 14, 2009, and March 3, 2010. See also W. W. Tarn, “The Battle of Actium,” Journal of Roman Studies 21 (1931): 173–99; Casson, 1991. On ND, Plutarch, Table Talk, VIII.iv.723; Bowersock, 1965, 124–5, 134–8; and Mark Toher, “The Terminal Date of Nicolaus’s Universal History,” Ancient History Bulletin 1.6 (1987): 135–8. Angelos Chaniotis is very good on women and warfare, War in the Hellenistic World (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 110ff.

For the Greek stay, the work of Christian Habicht, especially “Athens and the Ptolemies,” Classical Antiquity 11, no. 1 (April 1992): 68–90. Seneca, Suasoriae, 1.7, mentions lampoons against A in Athens.

1. “illicit affairs”: Lucan, X.76. The translation is from Jones, 2006, 66.