1. Dead men don’t bite: Pompey, LXXVII; Plutarch, “Brutus,” XXXIII. (Here and elsewhere I have opted for the Dryden translation, revised by Arthur Hugh Clough [New York: Modern Library, 1992]; henceforth “ML translation.”)
2. “It’s a godsend”: Menander, “The Doorkeeper,” Menander: The Plays and Fragments (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 264.
3. “wretched little boat”: Appian, II.84. On Pompey’s end, Appian, II.83–6; Dio, LXII.iii–iv; CW, 103; Plutarch, “Pompey,” LXXVII.
4. The plague, flood, fire comparison: Florus, II.xiii.5.
5. CR’s arrival in Egypt: Appian, II.89; Dio, XLII.vi–viii; CW, 106; AW, 1; JC, XLVIII; Plutarch, “Pompey,” LXXX.5–6.
6. “to put an end to”: CW, III.10.
7. “she was at a loss”: JC, XLIX (ML translation); Plutarch, JC, XLIX. For the best discussion of C’s arrival, John Whitehorne, “Cleopatra’s Carpet,” Atti del XXII Congresso Internazionale di Papirologia II (1998): 1287–93. On the coastal road geography, Alan H. Gardiner, “The Ancient Military Road between Egypt and Palestine,” Journal of Egyptian Archeology 6, no. 2 (April 1920): 99–116. Achilles Tatius describes the trip from Pelusium to Alexandria via the Nile, III.9; see also Polybius, V.80.3. Interviews with Lionel Casson, April 18, 2009; John Swanson, September 10, 2008; Dorothy Thompson, April 22, 2008. Roger Bagnall points out that C might also have crossed the delta below the coastal area, where she would have had the advantage of a road, Bagnall to author, june 8, 2010.
8. “malevolent cunning”: Diodorus, I.30.7. Similarly MA, III.
9. “majestic”: Dio, XLII.xxxiv. 6.
10. “knowledge of how to make”: Dio, XLII.xxxiv.5.
11. impossible to converse with her: MA, XXVII; Dio, XLII.xxxiv.5.
12. “by his rapidity”: Dio, XLII.lvi.1.
13. “love-sated man”: Ibid., XLII.xxxiv.5.
14. “every woman’s man”: Suetonius, citing Curio, DJ, LII.3.
15. “a mere boy”: Dio, XLII.iii.3.
16. The depraved and wanton C: C is far from alone in having developed a retroactive sexual history. As Margaret Atwood notes of Jezebel, “The amount of sexual baggage that has accumulated around this figure is astounding, since she doesn’t do anything remotely sexual in the original story, except put on makeup.” “Spotty-Handed Villainesses: Problems of Female Bad Behavior in the Creation of Literature,” http://gos.sbc.edu/a/atwood.html.
17. “all men work more”: Dio, XXXVII.lv.2.
18. As one chronicler pointed out: “To the king I could have given back what he deserves, and in return for such a present to your brother, Cleopatra, could have sent your head.” Lucan puts words in CR’s mouth, 1069–71.
19. “Nothing was dearer”: AW, 70.
20. On Alexander the Great’s resting place: For an artful reconstruction of the tomb and its location, see Andrew Chugg, “The Tomb of Alexander the Great in Alexandria,” American Journal of Ancient History 1.2 (2002): 75–108.
21. household statues of Alexander: Robert Wyman Hartle, “The Search for Alexander’s Portrait,” in W. Lindsay Adams and Eugene N. Borza, eds., Philip II, Alexander the Great and the Macedonian Heritage (Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1982), 164.
22. Ptolemaic history: On the troublesome Ptolemaic genealogy, Bennett, 1997. Strabo is also eloquent on the subject. For the shaky argument that C was the daughter of a priestly Egyptian family, see Werner Huss, “Die Herkunft der Kleopatra Philopater,” Aegyptus 70 (1990): 191–203. And on the wobbly Ptolemaic grasp of power, Brian C. McGing, “Revolt Egyptian Style: Internal Opposition to Ptolemaic Rule,” Archiv für Papyrusforschung 43.2 (1997): 273–314; Leon Mooren, “The Ptolemaic Court System, Chronique d’Egypte LX (1985): 214–22. Anna Swiderek offers a nearly humorous overview of the family violence in “Le rôle politique d’Alexandrie au temps des Ptolémées,” Prace Historyczne 63 (1980): 105–15.
23. “an orgy of pillage”: François Chamoux, Hellenistic Civilization (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 135.
24. On Auletes the piper: The name may as well have been fitted to Ptolemy XII on account of his Dionysian devotion, Bianchi, 1988, 156.
25. house of her choice: Cited in Hopkins, 1980, 337.
26. On women and business: See especially Pomeroy, 1990, 125–73. The one-third estimate is Bowman’s, 1986, 98, and in part the result of inheritance and dowries.
27. “the women urinate” to “defy description”: Herodotus, The Histories, George Rawlinson, tr. (New York: Knopf, 1997), II.xxxv. On paradoxical Egypt, Diodorus, I.27.1–2; Strabo, 1.2.22, 17.2.5; the upside-down conviction dates back to Sophocles. Generally for the Greek view of Egypt, Phiroze Vasunia, The Gift of the Nile: Hellenizing Egypt from Aeschylus to Alexander (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).
28. “Built in the finest”: Philo, “On the Embassy to Gaius,” XLIII.338. C. D. Yonge translation, The Works of Philo (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1993).
29. the contested kingship: In some interpretations the petitioner, Cleopatra Selene, was in fact Auletes’ own mother. Either way, a Ptolemaic woman did not hesitate to make her opinion known—and was willing to cross an ocean to do so.
30. C’s mother: In Chris Bennett’s reconstruction, Cleopatra VI Tryphaena was Auletes’ cousin rather than his sister, 1997, 39–66.
31. giraffes, rhinoceroses, bears: Athenaeus, cited in Tarn and Griffith, 1959, 307.
32. death has been said: The point is Thompson’s, 1988, 78.
33. She did not have to venture far: The point is E. M. Forster’s, Forster, 2004, 34.
34. “The ears of a youth” to “be educated”: Cited in Cribiore, 2001, 69.
35. “prince of literature”: NH, II.iv.13.
36. “nursed in their learning”: Heraclitus, Homeric Problems, 1.5.
37. “for… as reason is the glory”: Cicero, Brutus, XV.59. As Elizabeth Rawson put it, “The end of rhetoric tended to be persuasion rather than truth, while the extravagant subjects set for the budding orator to prove his skill on often stimulated ingenuity rather than serious thought about important problems” (Cicero: A Portrait [London: Bristol Classical Press, 2001], 9).
38. On Pompey’s murder as exercise: Quintilian, 7.2.6 and 3.8.55–8.
39. “The art of speaking”: Ibid., 2.13.16. The lunatic ravings, Ibid., 2.10.8.
40. “Some women are younger”: George Bernard Shaw, “Notes to Caesar and Cleopatra,” in Three Plays for Puritans (New York: Penguin, 2000), 249.
41. “sparkling eyes”: Boccaccio, Famous Women (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 363. Boccaccio gives C the best of both worlds: As she “could captivate almost anyone she wished with her sparkling eyes and her powers of conversation, C had little trouble bringing the lusty prince [CR] to her bed.”
42. On hieroglyphs: John Baines, “Literacy and Ancient Egyptian Society,” Man 18, no. 3 (1983): 572–99.