twice her great-great-grandfather.
* Alexander the Great’s family included two Cleopatras, his father’s last wife and a sister two years Alexander’s junior. Both were murdered by family members.
* It is also unclear whether she was Cleopatra’s mother, although if Cleopatra were illegitimate it is unlikely that that detail would have escaped her detractors.
* Theodotus escaped but was tracked down. By the time he began to figure in classroom discussions he had been crucified.
* The history parallels that of French on American soil. In colonial America, the language of the dissolute Old World was a vehicle of contagion; where French went, depravity and frivolity were sure to follow. By the nineteenth century, French was the indispensable agent of high culture, fuller of expression, richer of vocabulary, somehow maddeningly superior in its nuance and suppleness. At its edges the admiration bordered on resentment, to which it finally succumbed. An eventful century later, French was outmoded, long-winded, largely irrelevant, an affectation.
* The Hellenistic version of pregnant-and-barefoot-in-the-kitchen was a Roman epithet: “She loved her husband, she bore two sons, she kept the house and worked in wool.”
* Neither account was written from living memory. In only one version—a blundering sixth-century AD account—does anyone venture to make the shocking assertion that Caesar might have seduced Cleopatra.
* We know nothing of Arsinoe’s motives, which has not discouraged even the best modern interpreter of the Alexandrian War from speculation: Had she not felt jealous of her older sister’s masterful seduction of Caesar, asserts one historian, “She would not have been a woman.”
† Parthia is today northeastern Iran. The Pontic kingdom extended from the southern shore of the Black Sea into modern Turkey.
* To the Romans the Egyptian worship of animals was unspeakably primitive and perverse. A second-century Christian took a different view. By comparison with the Greek gods, the Egyptian deities fared well. “They may be irrational animals,” conceded Clement of Alexandria, “but still they are not adulterous, they are not lewd, and not one of them seeks for pleasure contrary to its own nature.”
* Their fervor was lost on later Romans. As Dio would write centuries afterward, the Alexandrians were “most ready to assume a bold front everywhere and to speak out whatever may occur to them, but for war and its terrors they are utterly useless.”
* At the same time it is interesting that the general who continues Caesar’s narrative takes such care to emphasize—on his first page and curiously out of context—that the city was fireproof. His assertion contradicts the other early sources, which claim that fire spread from the ships to the docks to the great library. It fails to acknowledge too the masterfully manipulated roofs and beams or the timber barricades of Caesar’s account. We are left with a gratuitous apology, and without an offense.
* The gift was welcome but the timing was awkward. Julia had been set to marry Quintus Servilius Caepio in a matter of days. He was most displeased. In her place, Pompey offered Caepio his own daughter, although she, in turn, was already engaged to someone else. For the most part Roman women were for horse trading, an idea that—for all their creative family machinations—rarely occurred to the Ptolemies.
* One modern historian goes so far as to suggest they expressly covered it up.
* The Sphinx was almost certainly invisible to Caesar and Cleopatra, buried still in sand, as it had been for nearly a thousand years.
* The most common graffito: “I saw, and I was amazed.”
* Like so much else in her life—the Nile cruise, the Roman stay, her good faith at Actium—the paternity of this child and the timing of his birth have been contested. His appearance seemed too good and too opportune to be true. Otherwise the skeptics’ case rests on Caesar’s presumed infertility. Despite a vigorous sex life, he had sired no progeny in thirty-six years. As early as Suetonius the paternity issue was raised; there is a curious silence in the record where one might expect outrage, and, too, an absence of material evidence. That silence can be read equally as affirmation: the birth was so distasteful, the evidence that Cleopatra had hoodwinked Caesar so great, that it was wise to keep the matter quiet. Caesar certainly thought the child his, as did both Antony and Augustus.
* Sounding some familiar, inaccurate notes, a historian of Cleopatra’s day credited Isis with Egypt’s upside- down social hierarchy. In deference to her great wisdoms, claimed Diodorus, the Egyptians had ordained that “the queen should have greater power and honor than the king, and that among private persons the wife should enjoy authority over her husband, the husbands agreeing in the marriage contract that they will be obedient in all things to their wives.”
* The one exception has been shown to have been the police. Though Greek at the higher level and Egyptian at the lower, they made for an egalitarian force, uncommonly efficient and responsive, on occasion even reprimanding officials. They took the law seriously. They also worked more or less autonomously, considerately relieving the Ptolemies of concerns with “stolen donkeys and assaults on grandmothers.”
* On one contemporary list Cleopatra appears as the twenty-second richest person in history, well behind John D. Rockefeller and Tsar Nicholas II, but ahead of Napoleon and J. P. Morgan. She is assigned a net worth of $95.8 billion, or more than three Queen Elizabeth IIs. It is of course impossible accurately to convert currencies
