Cleopatra: A Life

across eras.

* The good king was advised to stay home. The poor resented his absence, while—obliged to accompany him—the rich felt forced into exile.

* As Seneca observed: “Easier for two philosophers to agree than two clocks.”

* Plutarch deemed the future King Juba “the most fortunate captive ever taken,” as fate transported him from his “barbarian” land to Rome, where he was educated. He emerged as an eminent historian who wrote on a variety of subjects, from Roman antiquity to mythology to the behavior of elephants.

* Some took Cicero’s distaste further. If a man was an excellent piper, it followed that he was a worthless man. “Otherwise he wouldn’t be so good a piper,” notes Plutarch, quoting approvingly. The axiom did not work to the advantage of Cleopatra’s father. Despite ample evidence to the contrary, he would be written off as “not a real man, but a pipe-player and a charlatan.”

* The prevailing ethos is preserved in the literature. In the Iliad, women are the most perfect things in creation. They are also, as has been observed, as a general rule “teasing, scolding, thwarting, contradicting, and hoodwinking.” In the Greek plays, women have the key parts. There are few outsize female heroines in Roman literature, in which wives come in two varieties: the tyrannical rich and the spendthrift poor. Roman literature is notably short as well on deceived husbands, a comic staple from Aristophanes to Moliere.

* As Blaise Pascal asserted in the seventeenth century: “Had Cleopatra’s nose been shorter, the whole face of the world would have been changed.”

* Many have marveled at the tale, but only one man has sacrificed Tiffany pearls to a laboratory investigation of it. Does a pearl actually disintegrate in vinegar? Yes, if very slowly, reported B. L. Ullman, who in the end resorted to heat to nudge his 1956 experiment along: “When I boiled a pearl for 33 minutes the vinegar boiled off while I was reading a detective story. I can still smell that vinegar. The pearl seemed not to be affected, though I thought it looked a trifle peaked.” He got better results with stronger vinegar, the best results with pulverized pearl, which dissolved after three hours and twenty minutes of closely monitored boiling. This is the kind of thing to which Cleopatra has driven scholars. To the question of why Cleopatra (or anyone) might have attempted such a display in the first place—surely it made more dramatic sense to swallow the gem whole?— Ullman reminds us that pearls consist primarily of carbonate of lime, the ancient world’s bicarbonate of soda. They make an effective, if expensive, antacid.

* He was unapologetic, the more so as he was in the midst of his grief feverishly productive. He defied those “happy souls” who begrudged him his mourning to so much as read half the pages that he, in his misery, had written.

* There was plenty of precedent for this brand of inexactitude. Alexander the Great threw a festival to celebrate his conquest of India, which doubtless surprised the bedraggled, half-starved men who had barely survived that mission, having accomplished no such thing.

* This happened by necessity in the best of families, Plutarch assures us, monarchy being “so utterly unsociable a thing.” The rules for dispensing with fellow royals were, he held, as inflexible as those of geometry.

* Florence Nightingale was among those who marveled at the parallels between the Osiris and Christ stories. In Upper Egypt she sat spellbound through a Sunday morning in an Isis temple, one largely decorated by Cleopatra’s father. Few places had felt to her so sacred: “I cannot describe to you the feeling at Philae,” she wrote her family in 1850. “The myths of Osiris are so typical of our Saviour that it seemed to me as if I were coming to a place where He had lived—like going to Jerusalem; and when I saw a shadow in the moonlight in the temple court, I thought, ‘perhaps I shall see him: now he is there.’ ”

* She would be accused of having withheld distributions from the city’s Jews, which is unlikely. Customarily the Jews were loyal supporters of the female Ptolemies. They were river guards, police officers, army commanders, and high-ranking officials. They had fought for Auletes; they numbered among Cleopatra’s supporters in the desert in 48. And they had fought for her during the Alexandrian War, at the end of which Caesar had granted them citizenship.

* To complicate matters, there were both assassins and would-be assassins, who—the French Resistance fighters of their day—enlisted after the fact. Also to complicate matters, Lepidus and Cassius were brothers-in-law. Both were related by marriage as well to Brutus.

* A truly eloquent man is the one who can argue both sides of a case with equal finesse. “And so, if by chance you find anyone who despises the sight of beautiful things,” Cicero noted in the same speech, “whom neither scent nor touch nor taste seduces, whose ears are deaf to all sweet sounds—such a man I, perhaps, and some few will account heaven’s favorite, but most the object of its wrath.” As it happened, Cicero lived in one of the grandest mansions in the grandest quarters of Rome, for which he had paid an astronomical sum. And while he was pleased that one of his villas had “an air of high thinking that rebukes the wild extravagance of other country houses,” he had to admit that an addition to it would be awfully nice.

* One wife hit on a particularly ingenious solution: she secreted her husband off to the coast in a hemp or leather sack, the kind into which Cleopatra had crawled.

* It was lost en route.

* It takes a hard heart to argue that Antony resisted the irresistible Egyptian queen but it has been done. The great Ronald Syme makes of Cleopatra just another notch on the bedpost, assigning her to a list of more or less interchangeable client queens. In his opinion there was no infatuation at all; Antony “succumbed with good will