Cleopatra: A Life (45 page)

For miracle-working—a category that includes producing a pencil out of thin air, comparing two-thousand-year-old currencies, scuba diving in the Alexandrian harbor, and equably sharing an address with a writer—I owe an incalculable debt to Marc de La Bruyère. He makes the last line easiest, as none of the preceding ones would have been written without him.

Endpapers: Nimatallah / Art Resource, NY

Watercolor of the Canopic Way: Jean-Claude Golvin

Watercolor of Alexandria: Jean-Claude Golvin

The world as Cleopatra knew it: Cram’s 1895 Universal Atlas

Possible Cleopatra, in Parian marble: Sandro Vannini / Corbis

Possible Cleopatra, with tight chignon: Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz / Art Resource, NY

Possible Cleopatra, without a diadem: © The Trustees of the British Museum

Possible Cleopatra, with pronounced cheekbones: © Hellenic Republic / Ministry of Culture / Delos Museum

Women playing knucklebones: © The Trustees of the British Museum

Girl with writing tablet: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY

Ptolemy Auletes: Courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum

Ivory game piece depicting Ptolemy XIV: Bibliothèque nationale de France

Likely Caesarion, in granite: Araldo de Luca

Granite Cleopatra as Isis: © Musée royal de Mariemont

Bust of Ptolemy Philadelphus: Jack A. Josephson

Basalt statue of Cleopatra: Image courtesy of the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum, San Jose, California

Likely Alexander Helios: Photo © The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore

Cleopatra stela: Louvre, Paris, France / Lauros / Giraudon / The Bridgeman Art Library

Bust of Caesar: Scala / Art Resource, NY

Buchis bull stela: Cairo, Egyptian Museum

Chalcedony intaglio of Caesar: Bibliothèque nationale de France

Bust of Mark Antony: akg-images

Red jasper intaglio of Mark Antony: © The Trustees of the British Museum

Bronze Cyprus coin: © The Trustees of the British Museum

Bronze Alexandria coin: Hunterian Museum, University of Glasgow

Silver Antioch tetradrachm: Courtesy of the American Numismatic Society

Silver Ascalon tetradrachm: By courtesy of The Fan Museum, Greenwich, London

Gold ring with Ptolemaic queen: V&A Images, Victoria and Albert Museum

Blue glass intaglio: © The Trustees of the British Museum

Temple of Hathor at
Dendera
: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY

Bust of Cicero: Galleria degli Uffizi, Alinari / The Bridgeman Art Library

Statue of Octavian: National Archaeological Museum, Athens

Bust of Octavia: The Granger Collection /
GetStock.com

Hellenistic mosaic: © Bibliotheca Alexandria Antiquities Museum, photo by Mohamed Nafea

Gold, stone, and glass earrings: Art Resource, NY

Crocodile denarius: TopFoto /
GetStock.com

THE DEAD ENDS
and missing pieces in Cleopatra’s story have worked a paradoxical effect; they have kept us relentlessly coming back for more. To centuries of literature on the last queen of Egypt add a recent surge in fine Hellenistic scholarship; a catalogue of the secondary sources would easily amount to a fat volume of its own. I have opted not to write it. Where much material has been distilled into little, chapter headnotes indicate central texts. Volumes that have shaped the narrative as a whole—the ones I have pulled most frequently from the shelf—appear in the selected bibliography. Those texts are cited here by author’s last name and publication date. Primary sources and periodicals appear exclusively below. Footnotes offer an occasional elaboration on a theme.

Translations of the Greek or Latin are from the Loeb Classical Library unless noted and with three general exceptions: For Appian and for Caesar’s
Civil War
I have used John Carter’s fluid translations (Penguin, 1996, and Oxford, 1998, respectively). For Lucan I have drawn from Susan H. Braund’s 2008 Oxford University Press edition. Where translations differ markedly from published texts I am grateful to Inger Kuin, who untangled awkward phrasings and reconciled contradictory ones. Cleopatra VII, Julius Caesar, and Mark Antony are abbreviated as C, CR, and A. Names of principal sources are rendered as follows:

1.
“That Egyptian woman”
: Florus, II.xxi.11. Translation from Ashton, 2008, 2.

2.
“Man’s most valuable”
: From Euripides’ “Helen,” in
Euripides II: The Cyclops, Heracles, Iphigenia in Tauris, Helen
, David Grene and Richmond Lattimore, eds.; Richmond Lattimore, tr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959), 1615.

3.
greater prestige
: JA, XV.l0l.

4.
“either destroy everything”
: Sallust, “Letter of Mithradates,” 21.

5.
A Roman historian
: JA, XIII.408 vs. XIII.430.

6.
marriage contract
: Rowlandson, 1998, 322.

7.
“by being scrupulously chaste”
: Dio, LVIII.ii.5.

8.
“natural talent for deception”
: Cicero to Quintus, 2 (I.2), c. November 59. Cicero had no taste for the “whole tribe” of easterners: “On the contrary I am sick and tired of their fribbling, fawning ways and their minds always fixed on present advantage, never on the right thing to do.”

9.
“a loose girl of sixteen”
: James Anthony Froude,
Caesar: A Sketch
(New York: Scribner’s, 1879), 446.

10.
“odious extravagance”
: Pompey, 24.

11.
The historical methods
: Writing a good 130 years after C, Josephus attacked the veracity and the methods of his contemporaries: “We have actually had so-called histories even of our recent war published by persons who never visited the sites nor were anywhere near the actions described, but, having put together a few hearsay reports, have, with the gross impudence of drunken revelers, miscalled their productions by the name of history” (
Against Apion,
I.46). He simultaneously maligned the ancient Greeks for offering contradictory accounts of the same events—after which he proceeded to do so himself.

12.
The reliance on memory
: The point is K. R. Bradley’s, introduction to Suetonius,
Lives of the Caesars I
, 14.