1.
93. On the Egyptomania: Carla Alfano, “Egyptian Influences in Italy,” in Walker and Higgs, 2001, 286–8. Earlier, Cicero (De Legibus, II.2) had heaped scorn on Rome’s fashionable faux-Egyptian landscapes. Future Roman emperors would embrace Egyptian culture as Octavian did not; see Rene Preys, “Les empereurs romains vus de l’Egypte,” in Les Empereurs du Nil (Leuven, Belgium: Editions Peeters, 2000), 30–3.
94. a golden age of women: See Reinhold, 1988, 72; Kleiner and Matheson, 1996, 36–9.
95. Livia’s status: Dio, LVII.12. For good modern accounts, Anthony A. Barrett, Livia: First Lady of Imperial Rome (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002); Ruth Bertha Hoffsten, “Roman Women of Rank of the Early Empire in Public Life as Portrayed by Dio, Paterculus, Suetonius, and Tacitus” (PhD dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1939). On Livia’s staff, Balsdon, 1962, 93, 276. Kleiner, 2005, 251–7, has Livia deliberately modeling her ascent on C.
96. The melted tableware: DA, LXXI. And, professes Dio, Octavian kept none of C’s furnishings save for “a single agate cup.”
97. “For it is fitting”: Dio, LII.xxx.1–2. C was even outdone as a consumer of pearls. Lollia Paulina, Caligula’s third wife, was said to have appeared at a banquet “covered with emeralds and pearls interlaced alternately and shining all over her head, hair, ears, neck and fingers, the sum total amounting to the value of 40,000,000 sesterces.” That was four times the price of C’s pearl, and Lollia stood ready to offer up the receipts to prove it, NH, IX.lviii.
98. the whisper about Livia: Tacitus, Annals, I.10.
99. “that no high position”: Dio, LV.xv.1–2.
100. “Validity was restored”: VP, II.lxxxix.
101. “from a most grievous danger”: J.H.C. Williams, “ ‘Spoiling the Egyptians’: Octavian and Cleopatra,” in Walker and Higgs, 2001, 197.
102. Tiberius’s scoff: Dio, LVII.xviii.2.
103. “How much more attention”: Brutus to Cicero, 25 (I.16).
104. “A man who teaches a woman”: Menander, cited in Lefkowitz and Fant, 1992, 31.
105. “ancient writers repeatedly speak”: The author of the pornographic piece is uncertain, Hughes-Hallett, 1991, 68.
106. “she often played the prostitute”: Propertius, Elegies, 3.11.30. Skinner points out that the famous prostitute, denounced for her greed and celebrated for her wit, already constituted a familiar trope in history and biography, 2005, 167.
107. “many men bought nights”: Aurelius Victor, De Viris Illistribus, 86.2. With “Egyptian Nights,” Pushkin enthusiastically took off from there.
108. “a dazzling piece of witchcraft”: Anna Jameson, Memoirs of Celebrated Female Sovereigns (New York: Harper, 1836), 55.
109. “that disgusting Cleopatra”: Nightingale’s January 1850 letter, cited in Vallee, 2003, 244. C’s crime was to have immortalized herself—and Caesarion—with the carvings at Hermonthis. In The Way We Live Now, Trollope’s irrepressible Matilde Carbury airily sums up C’s career with “What a wench she was!” Lady Carbury is energetically flogging her new volume, Criminal Queens.
110. “How would you like”: Cecil B. DeMille, in Lovric, 2001, 83.
111. “wily and suspicious”: Plutarch, “Pompey,” LXX.4 (translation reworked). The marriages are “tricks of state” in the ML edition, “suspicious and deceptive” partnerships in the Loeb. As Alexander the Great’s repeatedly wed father had discovered, marriage was much cheaper than war.
112. “who had already ruined”: MA, LXVI. She comes in for the worst abuse from Josephus, who nearly hyperventilates enumerating her crimes, Against Apion, II, 57–9: C “committed every kind of iniquity and crime against her relatives, her devoted husbands [sic], the Romans in general, and their emperors, her benefactors; who slew her innocent sister Arsinoe in the temple, treacherously assassinated her brother, plundered her country’s gods and her ancestors’ sepulchers; who, owing her throne to the first Caesar, dared to revolt against his son and successor, and, corrupting Antony by sensual passion, made him an enemy to his country and faithless to his friends, robbing some of their royal rank, discharging others, and driving them into crime.”
113. mother of Christ: See Jack Lindsay, Mark Antony: His World and His Contemporaries (London: Routledge, 1936), 231.
114. “the most illustrious and wise”: Chronicle of John, Bishop of Nikiu, 67.5–10. Cited in Lindsay, 1998, 333. He nominates C as the greatest of the Ptolemies, though also credits her with achievements not her own.
115. a rollicking tribute to guilt-free middle-aged adultery: Rene Weis, Decoding a Hidden Life: Shakespeare Unbound (New York: Holt, 2007), 355–8. Weis notes that Shakespeare was forty-three while working on the play. So is A as the curtain rises.
116. Blame Shakespeare: Antony and Cleopatra was itself written off as indecent through much of the nineteenth century. Although it includes what many consider Shakespeare’s best female role, the play is famously lacking in fine productions and in admirers. In 1938 Somerset Maugham offered an explanation for its unpopularity: “Audiences have felt that it was contemptible to throw away an empire for a woman’s sake. Indeed if it were not founded on an accepted legend they would be unanimous in asserting that such a thing was incredible” (The Summing Up [Garden City: Doubleday, 1938], 138–9). A and C’s grand and hopeless passion is lost on the British, who were “not an amorous race,” and generally, in Maugham’s view, one disgusted by sex. They did not ruin themselves for a woman. Which may or may not explain why the play was the favorite of Emily Dickinson; see Judith Farr, “Emily Dickinson’s ‘Engulfing’ Play: Antony and Cleopatra,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 9, no. 2 (1990): 231–50. Samuel Johnson and William Hazlitt too gave the play mixed grades; Johnson found it overblown and carelessly constructed. It gave George Bernard Shaw dyspepsia. Coleridge alone ranked Antony and Cleopatra among Shakespeare’s greatest.
117. “What woman, what ancient succession”: Cited in Hebert W. Benario, “The ‘Carmen de Bello Actiaco’ and Early Imperial Epic,” Aufsteig und Niedergang der romischen Welt II, 30.3 (1983): 1661. For more on that fragment, see Bastien Pestel, “Le ‘De Bello Actiaco,’ ou l’epopee de Cleopatre” (MA thesis, Universite de Laval, 2005).
118. “What is it to lose” to “worse than people say”: Euripides, “The Phoenician Women,” in Euripides V, 388–90.
119. “who destroyed the Egyptian monarchy”: Athenaeus, VI.229c (translation reworked). A generation and a half after C’s death, Philo reflected on the impermanence of wealth and power. His own country offered a prime example, On Joseph, 135–6: “Egypt had once the supreme authority over many nations, but now it is a slave…. Where is the house of the Ptolemies, and the glory of the individual successors of Alexander which at one time shone over all the bounds both of earth and sea?” C had been the last of that line.
