43. On the population: Estimates range from 3 million (Thompson, 1988) to 6 million (Walter Schiedel, Death on the Nile [Leiden: Brill, 2001]) to 10 million (Grant, 2004); the Loeb editors (Diodorus, I) and Fraser (1972, II, 171–2) prefer 7 million. In the first century AD Josephus estimated the population of Egypt excluding Alexandria to be 7.5 million. Diodorus gives Alexandria a population of some 500,000, which seems plausible; Fraser prefers 1 million. See Roger S. Bagnall and Bruce W. Frier, The Demography of Roman Egypt (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
44. seven nationalities: Mostafa El-Abbadi, The Life and Fate of the Ancient Library of Alexandria (Paris: Unesco, 1990), 45.
45. “unlike that of”: Herodotus, 1997, IV.clxxxii.
46. “It was a pleasure”: MA, XXVII (ML translation).
47. a very similar Greek: On the koine of C and CR, interview with Dorothy Thompson, April 22, 2008; Geoffrey C. Horrocks, Greek: A History of the Language and Its Speakers (New York: Longman, 1997), 33–108.
48. “The better one gets”: Cicero, quoting his grandfather, On the Orator, 2:17–18, translation from Gruen, 1984, I, 262.
49. sex manuals: Andrew Dalby, Empire of Pleasures: Luxury and Indulgence in the Roman World (London: Routledge, 2000), 123.
50. “with fingers of its own”: Juvenal, Satire 6, 200.
51. “including some I should not care”: Quintilian, 1.8.6. He was referring in particular to Horace.
52. “extremely learned”: Cited in Lionel Casson, Libraries in the Ancient World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 78.
53. “She loved her husband”: Cited in M. I. Finley, Aspects of Antiquity (London: Chatto, 1968), 142.
54. “highly educated”: Pompey, LV.1–2 (ML translation).
55. “she was a woman”: Sallust, War with Catiline, XXV. Notes Cicero approvingly of a good Roman matron: “There was never a topic she thought she knew well enough.” Clement of Alexandria inventories female intellectuals in The Stromata, 4.19, citing especially the cake bakers among them.
56. On the library and museum: Roger S. Bagnall, “Alexandria: Library of Dreams,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 146, no. 4 (December 2002): 348–62; Casson, 2001; El-Abbadi, 1990; Andrew Erskine, “Culture and Power in Ptolemaic Egypt: The Museum and Library of Alexandria,” Greece & Rome 42, no. 1 (April 1995): 38–48. Fraser I, 1972, 452; Roy MacLeod, The Library of Alexandria (London: Tauris, 2000). Frederic C. Kenyon offers a fine guide to the scrolls themselves, Books and Readers in Ancient Greece and Rome (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932). A volume of Plato’s Symposium, notes Kenyon, might be twenty-three feet long.
57. “he’s either dead”: Cited in Marrou, 1956, 145.
58. CR’s fondness for pearls: DJ, XLVII.
59. “braver than all the men”: Manetho, The History of Egypt, Fr. 21b (Armenian version of Eusebius).
60. only one Latin poet: Lucan, X.60–1.
61. “was not in itself” to “bewitching”: MA, XXVII.2–3 (ML translation).
62. “striking,” exquisite: Dio, XLII.xxxiv.4. The sixth-century AD Byzantine writer John Malalas also extols her beauty.
63. “famous for nothing”: Boccaccio, cited in Walker and Higgs, 2001, 147.
CHAPTER III: CLEOPATRA CAPTURES THE OLD MAN BY MAGIC
For the Alexandrian War, Appian, Dio, CR, Lucan, and Plutarch, with caution. The finest modern source remains Paul Graindor, La guerre d’Alexandrie (Le Caire: Société Anonyme Egyptienne, 1931). It should be noted that CR and his ghostwriter offer the sole contemporary accounts of the war.
No one is better on Auletes and his travails than Mary Siani-Davies, especially her “Ptolemy XII Auletes and the Romans,” Historia 46 (1997): 306–40; reprinted, in slightly different form, in Cicero’s Speech: Pro Rabirio Postumo (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), 1–38. See also Dio, XXXIX.xiii–xv and liv–lix; Herwig Maehler, “Egypt under the Last Ptolemies,” Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies 30 (1983): 1–19. On the restoration, Dio, Plutarch, and most pointedly Cicero; Israel Shatzman’s fine “The Egyptian Question in Roman Politics,” Latomus 30 (1971): 363–9; Richard S. Williams, “Rei Publicae Causa: Gabinius’s Defense of His Restoration of Auletes,” Classical Journal 81, no. 1 (1985): 25–38.
For CR’s Egyptian stay and the Nile cruise: Appian, Dio, Diodorus, Pliny, Strabo, Suetonius, Tacitus. I have relied a great deal on Victoria Ann Foertmeyer’s especially fine “Tourism in Graeco-Roman Egypt” (Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University, 1989). Also: Abdullatif A. Aly, “Cleopatra and Caesar at Alexandria and Rome,” Roma e l’Egitto nell’antichita classica, Atti del I Congresso Internazionale Italo-Egiziano (1989): 47–61; Lionel Casson, 1974, 256–91; Casson, Ships and Seamanship in the Ancient World (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971); T. W. Hillard, “The Nile Cruise of Cleopatra and Caesar,” Classical Quarterly 52, no. 2 (2002): 549–54; Louis E. Lord, “The Date of Julius Caesar’s Departure from Alexandria,” Journal of Roman Studies 28 (1930): 19–40; J. Grafton Milne, “Greek and Roman Tourists in Egypt,” Journal of Egyptian Archeology 3, 2/3 (1916): 76–80; Neal, 1975, 19–33; Thompson, “Hellenistic Royal Barges,” unpublished talk, Athens, 2009. The point of the trip: Willy Clarysse, “The Ptolemies Visiting the Egyptian Chora,” in Politics, Administration and Society in the Hellenistic and Roman World, Leon Mooren, ed., Bertinoro Colloquium (Leuven, Belgium: Peeters, 2000), 33–40. For winds, weather, wildlife: Sophia Poole’s vivid The Englishwoman in Egypt (Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 2003). For the second-century account of Lucius Memmius’s visit: George Milligan, ed., Selections from the Greek Papyri (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1910), 29–31.
1. Cleopatra captures the old man: A variation on Lucan, 360.
2. “A woman who is generous”: Quintilian, V.11.27.
3. “captivated” to “overcome”: Plutarch, XLIX (ML translation).
4. “to such an extent” to “assumed to be”: Dio, XLII.xxxiv.ii–xxv–ii.
5. “on the condition”: JC, XLIX (ML translation).
6. They assumed that they had signed: Florus, II.xiii.55–6.
7. a blundering sixth-century AD account: Chronicle of John Malalas, Books VIII–XVIII (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1940), 25.
8. depleted legions: A. B. Bosworth supplies an idea of their exhaustion, “Alexander the Great and the Decline of Macedon,” The Journal of Hellenic Studies 106 (1986): 1–12.
9. “promised to do”: Dio, XLII, xxxv.4.
10. “ability to inflame”: Cicero, Brutus, LXXX.279.
11. “particularly anxious”: CW, III.109.
12. “had given the kingdom”: Dio, XLII.xxxvi.3.
13. “busy, listening fellow” to “embarrassing war”: JC, XLIX (ML translation).
14. “a man of remarkable nerve”: CW, III.104.
15. “that the royal name”: CW, III.109.
16. Arsinoe burned with ambition: By one account (Strabo, 17.1.11) the two sisters had escaped together to Syria during the earlier uprising.