Cleopatra: A Life (50 page)

36. On the devaluation and C’s coins, see Guy Weill Goudchaux, “Was Cleopatra Beautiful? The Conflicting Answers of Numismatics,” in Walker and Higgs, 2001, 210–14. Chauveau, 2000, 86, succinctly terms devaluation “the ancient equivalent of printing money.”

37.
“the equivalent of all of the hedge fund”
: Interview with Roger Bagnall, November 21, 2008.

38.
palace drinking contest
: Athenaeus, X.415. Athenaeus (XII.522) also mentions that a philosopher earned twelve
talents
a year, which sounds high. The bail is from Casson, 2001, 35; he equates fifteen talents with millions of modern dollars. For the impressive monuments, Peter Green,
Alexander of Macedon
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 414. Marrinan, 1998, asserts that you could hire an army of 10,000 men for a year with 1,000 talents, 16. Diodorus reports that for a lowly Roman craftsman a talent was the equivalent of seventeen years’ wages, Josephus ( JW, I.483) that a prince with a private income of 100 talents was a man to be reckoned with. During the honeymoon of Egypto-Roman relations, a visiting Roman dignitary was offered gifts worth eighty talents—so immodest a sum he did not accept (Plutarch, “Lucullus,” 2). On a more prosaic level, a talent bought enough wheat to feed a man for seventy-five years. See also Tarn and Griffin, 1959, 112–16.

39.
one contemporary list
:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richest_man_in_history
.

40. The trip to Rome: This is based on the best educated guess in the business, that of Casson. Interviews, January 26, 2009, and June 18, 2009. See also Casson, 1971; Casson,
The Ancient Mariners
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991); Casson, 1994. He describes the entire arduous system in “The Feeding of the Trireme Crews and an Entry in IG ii2 1631,”
Transactions of the American Philological Association
125 (1995): 261–9; and in “The Isis and Her Voyage,”
Transactions of the American Philological Association
81 (1950): 43–56. Casson to author, December 9, 2008. For comparisons see Philo, “Against Flaccus,” V.25ff, “On the Embassy to Gaius,” 250–3; JW, 1.280; Horace, Satires, I.5; Germanicus’s travels in Tacitus,
Annals,
II.50; Casson on Cicero and Pliny, 1994, 149–53. C may well have docked at Ostia, which Bagnall and Thompson think more likely; Casson preferred Puzzuoli, as there were at the time no docking facilities of any size at Ostia (Casson, 1991, 199). It is not impossible that C embarked or disembarked at Brundisium as would Horace (heading west) and as had Cicero, heading east. From there she would have made the long trek overland through hill country and along the Appian Way. That trip could be done in about seven days (Casson, 1994, 194–6).

41. The risks at sea: Achilles Tatius gives a fine (fictional) account of shipwreck, III.2–6. He washes up at Pelusium.

42.
arrival in Rome
: Eusebius, 183.3.

43.
“like a camel”
: Dio, XLIII. 23.2–3. See also Strabo, 16.4.16.

44. The advice regarding royal travel: Letter of Aristeas, 249, cited in T. A. Sinclair,
A History of Greek Political Thought
(London: Routledge, 1959), 292.

45.
“two chariots”
: An appalled Cicero to Atticus, 115 (V.1), February 20, 50, translation from Boissier, 1970, 120. Similarly Foertmeyer, 224; Plutarch, “Crassus,” XXI.6; Préaux, 1939, 561.

46. On the Rome of foul air and poor hygiene, and on the idyllic Janiculum: Leon Homo,
Rome impériale et l’urbanisme dans l’antiquité
(Paris: Albin Michel, 1951); Dionysius of Halicarnassus,
Roman Antiquities,
III.xlv; Horace, Odes, II.29, 9–12; Martial,
Epigrams
, IV.64. Otherwise Cicero remains the best guide to Rome. The stray hand and ox: Suetonius, “Vespasian,” 5.4.

47.
“Only the priests”
: JC, LIX (ML translation).

48.
“the only intelligent calendar”
: O. Neugebauer,
The Exact Sciences in Antiquity
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1952), 71. For the Egyptian calendar (twelve months of thirty days, to which were added five days, and at the end of every fourth year six days), see Strabo, 17.1.29.

49.
“to make them more desirous”
: DJ, XLII.

50.
“Easier for two philosophers”
: Seneca,
Apocolocyntosis,
2.2.

51.
On the Roman triumph
: Appian, Dio, Florus, Suetonius, and Mary Beard’s superb
The Roman Triumph
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007).

52.
“the most fortunate captive”
: JC, LV.2.

53.
“a woman and once considered”
: Dio, XLIII.xix.3–4.

54.
infants or chickens
: On the political and legal rights of women, Mary Beard and Michael Crawford,
Rome in the Late Republic
(London: Duckworth, 2005), 41.

55.
hundred swordsmen
: Cicero to Quintus, 12.2 (II.9), June 56.

56.
“Even if his slaves”
to “carvers”: Juvenal, Satire 9, 100ff.

57.
“absolutely devoted”
to “bloom of youth”: Dio, XLIII.xliii.4.

58.
“among the friends and allies”
: Dio, XLIII.xxviii.1. Gruen, 1984, 259, challenges the date of the statue’s installation. He moves it forward by some fifteen years, to make it a tribute not to C but to her defeat.

59.
“No one dances”
: Cicero,
Pro Murena,
13; translation from Otto Kiefer,
Sexual Life in Ancient Rome
(New York: Dorset Press, 1993), 166. As Athenaeus points out by contrast, “No other people are recorded as being more musical than the Alexandrians” (IV.176e).

60.
“You have to be a very rich”
: Juvenal, Satire 3, 236. The flying pots are also his, Ibid., 270ff.

61.
“Otherwise he wouldn’t be so good”
: Plutarch citing Antisthenes, “Pericles,” I.5.

62.
“not a real man”
: Athenaeus, V.206d.

63.
“superficially civilized”
: Lucan, in P. F. Widdows’s translation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 544.

64.
“the last word”
: Casson, 1998, 104.

65.
“idle and foolish”
: NH, XXXVI.xvi.75. In the Loeb, “They rank as a superfluous and foolish display of wealth.”

66.
Greek and Latin
: Quintilian acknowledges that the world sounded harsher in Latin, shorn as it was of the sweetest Greek letters, with which “the language at once seems to brighten us up and smile” (12.10).

67.
word… for “not possessing”
: Seneca, Epistle LXXXVII.40.

68.
“gold-inlay utensils”
: Dalby, 2000, 123. Dalby notes that a Greek accent alone carried with it a whiff of luxury, 122. Similarly Dio, LVII.xv.3; Valerius, Book IX, 1, “Of Luxury and Lust.” It seemed impossible to describe excess without recourse to Greek. It is Dalby who observes that “the classic practical manual of sexual behavior was in Greek, 123.

69. On the rise of luxury: Livy, 39.6; NH, XXXVI; Plutarch, “Caius Marius,” 34; Athenaeus, XII; Horace, Odes II, xv; Dalby, 2000; Wiseman, 1985, 102ff.

70.
The stolen napkins
: Catullus, Poems, 12 and 25; NH, 19.2.

71.
the beautiful vase of poisonous snakes
: Saint Jerome, cited in Jasper Griffin, “Virgil Lives!,”
New York Review of Books
( June 26, 2008): 24.

72.
Women in Rome
: Richard A. Bauman,
Women and Politics in Ancient Rome
(London: Routledge, 1992); Diana E. E. Kleiner and Susan B. Matheson, eds.,
I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome
(New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery, 1996); Barbara S. Lesko, “Women’s Monumental Mark on Ancient Egypt,”
Biblical Archeologist
54, no. 1 (1991), 4–15; Rawson, 1985; Marilyn B. Skinner’s fine
Sexuality in Greek and Roman Culture
(Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005); Wyke,
The Roman Mistress
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). Interview with Larissa Bonfante, February 2, 2009.

73.
“Hard work”
: Juvenal, Satire 6, 289ff.

74.
“teasing, scolding”
: Samuel Butler,
The Humour of Homer, and Other Essays
(London: A. C. Fifield, 1913), 60. Edith Hamilton remarks on the absence of deceived husbands in
The Roman Way
(New York: Norton, 1993), 35.

75.
“There’s nothing a woman”
: Juvenal, Satire 6, 460–1.

76.
even C’s eunuchs were rich
: Seneca, Epistle LXXXVII.16.

77. The much-discussed pearls: Suetonius,
“Caligula
,” XXXVII; Horace, Satire 2.iii.239; Pausanias, 8.18.6; NH, IX.lviii. C’s two pearls—“the largest in the whole of history”—are from Pliny, IX.119–121. Lucan too ropes a fortune in pearls around C’s neck and through her hair, X.139–40. See also Macrobius,
The Saturnalia,
3.17.14. In that much later account C and MA arrive at a wager over the pearl in the course of their extravagant feasting. They are well matched; “It was as the slave of this gluttony that he [MA] wished to make an Egyptian kingdom of the empire of Rome.” Plancus good-naturedly umpires the contest. For centuries C’s name remained a synonym for extravagance. In the fifth century AD Sidonius (Letter VIII.xii.8) described the most lavish of dinners as akin to “a feast of Cleopatra’s.”

78.
“When I boiled a pearl”
: B. L. Ullman, “Cleopatra’s Pearls,”
Classical Journal
52, no. 5 (1957): 196. See also Prudence J. Jones, “The Cleopatra Cocktail,” 1999,
http://www.apaclassics.org/AnnualMeeting/99mtg/abstracts/jonesp.html
. She finds the pearls do dissolve. Keats included the melted pearls in “Modern Love.”

79.
“the leaves at the top”
: Hesiod,
Works and Days,
680–1.

80.
“did not let”
to “name to the child”: DJ, LII.2.

81.
“was her best card”
: Aly, 1989, 51.

82.
needed to press her case
: Interview with Roger Bagnall, November 11, 2008.

83.
passionate, admiring letters
: Dio, LI.xii.3.

84.
“A more raffish assemblage”
: Cicero to Atticus, 16 (I.16.), early July 61. On broadening C’s base of support, Andrew Meadows to author, March 5, 2010.

85.
On C’s concern with the reorganization of the East
: Gruen, 2003, 271.

Generally on Rome’s political climate, Appian, Dio, Florus, Nicolaus of Damascus, Plutarch, Suetonius, and most eloquently, as always, Cicero. On Cicero, Plutarch, and Suetonius: for modern portraits, Everitt, 2003; and Elizabeth Rawson,
Cicero: A Portrait
(London: Bristol Classical Press, 2001). On the rain of honors, Appian, Cicero, Dio. For the geography of unlit Rome, the Janiculum Hill, etc.: Homo, 1951; Aly, 1989. On C and science, Monica Green, “The Transmission of Ancient Theories of Female Physiology and Disease through the Early Middle Ages” (Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University, 1985), 156–61, 185–9; Albert Neuberger,
The Technical Arts and Sciences of the Ancients
(London: Kegan Paul, 2003); Margaret Ott, “Cleopatra VII: Stateswoman or Strumpet?” (MA thesis, University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire, 1976); Okasha El Daly, “ ‘The Virtuous Scholar’: Queen Cleopatra in Medieval Muslim Arab Writings,” in Walker and Ashton, 2003, 51–6.

For the traditional Ides: Ovid,
Fasti
, iii, 523; Martial,
Epigrams
, IV.64. For the Ides of 44: Appian, II.111–119; Dio, XLIV; Florus, II.xiii.95; ND, 25.92, Fr. 130.19ff; JC, LXVI–LXVII; Plutarch, “Brutus,” XIV–XVIII; MA, XIII–XIV; DJ, LXXXII; VP, LVI.
Cicero provides the earliest details,
De Divinatione,
II.ix.23. See also Balsdon, “The Ides of March,”
Historia
7 (1958): 80–94; Nicholas Horsfall, “The Ides of March: Some New Problems,”
Greece & Rome
21, no. 2 (1974): 191–99.

1.
“Man is by nature”
: Aristotle,
Politics
, I.1253a.

2.
“O would that the female sex”
: Euripides, “Cyclops,” in
Euripides: Cyclops, Alcestis, Medea,
David Kovacs, ed., tr. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), 185.