Illustration Credits
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
Notes
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:
Appian
Appian,
The Civil Wars
Athenaeus
Athenaeus,
The Learned Banqueters
AA
Augustus,
Res Gestae Divi Augustus (The Acts of Augustus)
AW
Caesar,
Alexandrian War
CW
Caesar,
The Civil War
Cicero
Cicero’s letters
Dio
Dio Cassius,
Roman History
Diodorus
Diodorus of Sicily,
Library of History
Florus
Florus,
Epitome of Roman History
JA
Josephus,
Jewish Antiquities
JW
Josephus,
The Jewish War
Lucan
Lucan,
Civil War
ND
Nicolaus of Damascus,
Life of Augustus
Pausanias
Pausanias,
Description of Greece
NH
Pliny,
Natural History
Flatterer
Plutarch, “How to Tell a Flatterer from a Friend,”
Moralia
MA
Plutarch,
Lives,
“Antony”
JC
Plutarch,
Lives,
“Caesar”
Pompey
Plutarch,
Lives,
“Pompey”
Quintilian
Quintilian,
The Orator’s Education
Strabo
Strabo,
Geography
DA
Suetonius,
The Deified Augustus
(
Lives of the Caesars
)
DJ
Suetonius,
The Deified Julius
(
Lives of the Caesars
)
Valerius
Valerius Maximus,
Memorable Doings and Sayings
VP
Velleius Paterculus,
Compendium of Roman History
CHAPTER I: THAT EGYPTIAN WOMAN
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.