17. “One loyal friend”: Euripides, “Orestes,” in Euripides IV: Rhesus, The Suppliant Women, Orestes, Iphigenia in Aulis, David Grene and Richmond Lattimore, eds.; William Arrowsmith, tr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 805.
18. “She would not have been”: Graindor, 1931, 79. “Elle n’eut pas été femme—et une femme de la race des Lâgides—si elle n’avait été à la fois jalouse et humiliée de la séduction qu’exercait Cléopatre sur César.”
19. Epic struggle: For Mithradates’ epic battle against Rome, Philip Matyszak, Mithridates the Great: Rome’s Indomitable Enemy (Barnsley: Pen & Sword Military, 2008); and Adrienne Mayor, The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).
20. “no laws, human or divine” to “payment of money”: Sallust, “Letter of Mithradates,” 12, 17.
21. “fence of client states”: Polybius, V.34.
22. “a loss if destroyed”: Ronald Syme, The Roman Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 260.
23. consistent foreign policy: On Rome and the client kings, see Richard D. Sullivan’s superb Near Eastern Royalty and Rome (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990). Also David Braund, Rome and the Friendly King (New York: St. Martin’s, 1984); Anssi Lampela, Rome and the Ptolemies of Egypt: The Development of Their Political Relations, 273–80 BC (Helsinki: Societas Scientiarum Fennica, 1998); Mayor, 2010, on Mithradates’s parallel struggle; Willy Peremans and Edmond Van ’t Dack, “Sur les rapports de Rome avec les Lagides,” Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt (1972): 660–7; Shatzman, 1971. The housing project, Holbl, 2001, 224–25.
24. “just one continuous revel”: Dio Chrysostom, “The 32nd Discourse,” 69.
25. “These men habitually”: CW, III.110.
26. “They may be irrational animals”: Clement of Alexandria, “The Exhortation to the Greeks,” II.33p. The cat incident, Diodorus I.83. Evidently cats were a rarity on the northern side of the Mediterranean at the time. The animal worship invited ridicule from all quarters. See among others Juvenal, Satire 15.1; Philo, “On the Decalogue,” XVI.78–80, and “On the Contemplative Life,” 8; Josephus, Against Apion, II.81.
27. “bedeviled by certain individuals”: Cicero to Lentulus, 13 (I.2), January 15, 56.
28. “gained a highly invidious” to “royal largesse”: Ibid. 12 (I.1), January 13, 56.
29. “in his rage and spite”: MA, III (ML translation).
30. On the succession: J. C. Yardley, tr., Justin: Epitome of the Philippic History of Pompeius Trogus (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1994), 16.iiff; Jean Bingen, “La politique dynastique de Cléopâtre VII,” Comptes Rendus: Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres 1 (1999): 49–66; Lucia Criscuolo, “La successione a Tolemeo Aulete ed i pretesi matrimoni di Cléopâtre VII con i fratelli,” in Egitto e storia antica dall’ellenismo all’età araba (1989): 325–39. Working from several double-dated papyri, Ricketts, “A Chronological Problem in the Reign of Cleopatra VIII,” Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists 16:3 (1979): 213–17, advanced the theory that C attempted to eliminate Ptolemy XIII by installing their younger brother as her consort in the spring of 50. Certainly relations had already soured with their older brother. See also Ricketts, “A Dual Queenship in the Reign of Berenice IV,” Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists 27 (1990): 49–60; T. C. Skeat (who argues against a joint Auletes-Cleopatra rule), “Notes on Ptolemaic Chronology,” Journal of Egyptian Archeology 46 (Dec. 1960): 91–4; and (for Berenice’s murky reign) John Whitehorne, “The Supposed Co-Regency of Cleopatra Tryphaeana and Berenice IV,” in Akten des 21. Internationalen Papyrologenkongresses (Stuttgart: B. G. Teubner, 1997), II, 1009–13.
31. “habituated to the ill-disciplined ways”: CW, III.110.
32. On C’s ascension: There is another possible explanation for Auletes’ choice of the two siblings. Heinen, 2009, speculates that C’s father early on recognized the powerful personality and dangerous ambitions of his second daughter and invited Roman backing expressly to neutralize them, 35–6.
33. On Memphis: See especially El-Abbadi, 1990, 58; Lewis, 1986, 69ff; Thompson, 1988.
34. “boasting made permanent”: John D. Ray, “The Emergence of Writing in Egypt,” World Archaeology 17, no. 3 (1986): 311.
35. The burning of the Alexandrian library: Seneca is the first to mention the book burning, citing a figure of 40,000 volumes, a number that swells in subsequent accounts, to become 700,000 by the fourth century AD. Both Dio and Plutarch believed the library to have burned. Centuries of scholarship have been devoted to the vexed question; see Fraser, 1972, I, 334–5, 476; Edward Alexander Parsons, The Alexandrian Library: Glory of the Hellenic World (New York: Elsevier, 1967). Will, 2003, 533, believes that the destruction was less than legend has implied. For a roundup of the sources, http//www.bede.org.uk/library.htm. By that estimate, 500,000 scrolls would require 24.5 miles of shelving, or a two-story building measuring 100 feet by 100 feet.
36. “And there was not a soul”: AW, 15.
37. It has been suggested that he broke off: John Carter, introduction to CW (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), xxix. See also John H. Collins, “On the Date and Interpretation of the Bellum Civile,” American Journal of Philology 80, no. 2 (1959): 113–32.
38. “put into effect”: AW, 3.
39. “most ready to assume”: Dio, XXXIX.lviii.1–2.
40. “in order, as they claimed”: Ibid., XLII.xlii.2.
41. “against a king”: AW, XXIV. Heinen, 2009, reads CR’s release of Ptolemy as an act of desperation, 106–113. Unaware that reinforcements were on their way, CR had not yet begun to feel the tide turning; he was frantically buying time. On the constitution of the Egyptian army, Polybius, V.35.13 and V.36.3; G. T. Griffith, The Mercenaries of the Hellenistic World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1935); Marcel Launey, Recherches sur les armées hellénistiques, 2 vols. (Paris: Boccard, 1949); Raphael Marrinan, “The Ptolemaic Army: Its Organisation, Development and Settlement,” (PhD dissertation, University College, London, 1998). Marrinan places a barracks of elite guards on or near the palace grounds.
42. “to think of his ancestral” to “tears of joy”: AW, 24.
43. “The entire population”: AW, 32.
44. “a prodigy of activity”: Gaston Boissier, Cicero and His Friends (New York: Cooper Square Publishers, 1970), 185.
45. CR acquitted himself: Volkmann, 1958, 75.
46. “which blew absolutely”: CW, III.107.
47. “had remained loyal”: AW, 33.
48. “out of voluptuousness”: Dio, XLIV.46.2. See also Cicero to Atticus, 226 (XI.15), May 14, 47, and 230 (XI.18), June 19, 47. In the fourth century AD Eusebius returned to the theme, charging that CR returned C to the throne “in return for sexual favors” (Eusebius, 183.2).
49. the gratuitous apology: The point is El-Abbadi’s; he is firmly convinced that the library was a casualty of the war, 1990, 151.
50. “As to the war in Egypt”: JC, XLVIII (ML translation).
51. “for whose sake” to “in Caesar’s company”: Dio, XLII. 44.
52. in C’s bed every night: Pelling, 1999, 140.