FRONT COVER IMAGE
WELCOME
DEDICATION
MAPS
CHAPTER I
That Egyptian Woman
CHAPTER II
Dead Men Don’t Bite
CHAPTER III
Cleopatra Captures the Old Man by Magic
CHAPTER IV
The Golden Age Never Was the Present Age
CHAPTER V
Man Is by Nature a Political Creature
CHAPTER VI
We Must Often Shift the Sails When We Wish to Arrive in Port
CHAPTER VII
An Object of Gossip for the Whole World
CHAPTER VIII
Illicit Affairs and Bastard Children
CHAPTER IX
The Wickedest Woman in History
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ILLUSTRATION CREDITS
NOTES
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ALSO BY STACY SCHIFF
COPYRIGHT
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
STACY SCHIFF is the author of Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov), winner of the Pulitzer Prize; Saint-Exupéry, a Pulitzer Prize finalist; and A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America, winner of the George Washington Book Prize and the Ambassador Book Award. Schiff has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. The recipient of an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Schiff has contributed to The New Yorker, the New York Times, and the Washington Post, as well as many other publications. She lives in New York City.
ALSO BY STACY SCHIFF
A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America
Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov)
Saint-Exupéry: A Biography
* Even the fiction writers cannot agree about Caesar and Cleopatra. He loves her (Handel); he loves her not (Shaw); he loves her (Thornton Wilder).
* As they have done since time immemorial. “And the endeavor to ascertain these facts was a laborious task, because those who were eyewitnesses of the several events did not give the same reports about the same things, but reports varying according to their championship of one side or the other, or according to their recollection,” grumbled Thucydides, nearly four hundred years before Cleopatra.
* Ptolemy XIII surveyed the murder from the beach but for his part in it earned a permanent place in Dante’s ninth circle of hell. He keeps company with Cain and Judas.
* They were not alone. By one account, Alexander the Great consulted a famed oracle about his parentage. He had some questions, which is what happens when your mother is said to have mated with a snake. Wisely he left his entourage outside the temple and submitted a bribe in advance: he was, the oracle assured him, the son of Zeus.
* Given the congested genealogy, Ptolemy VIII was Cleopatra’s great-grandfather three times over—and twice her great-great-grandfather.
* Alexander the Great’s family included two Cleopatras, his father’s last wife and a sister two years Alexander’s junior. Both were murdered by family members.
* It is also unclear whether she was Cleopatra’s mother, although if Cleopatra were illegitimate it is unlikely that that detail would have escaped her detractors.
* Theodotus escaped but was tracked down. By the time he began to figure in classroom discussions he had been crucified.
* The history parallels that of French on American soil. In colonial America, the language of the dissolute Old World was a vehicle of contagion; where French went, depravity and frivolity were sure to follow. By the nineteenth century, French was the indispensable agent of high culture, fuller of expression, richer of vocabulary, somehow maddeningly superior in its nuance and suppleness. At its edges the admiration bordered on resentment, to which it finally succumbed. An eventful century later, French was outmoded, long-winded, largely irrelevant, an affectation.
* The Hellenistic version of pregnant-and-barefoot-in-the-kitchen was a Roman epithet: “She loved her husband, she bore two sons, she kept the house and worked in wool.”
* Neither account was written from living memory. In only one version—a blundering sixth-century AD account—does anyone venture to make the shocking assertion that Caesar might have seduced Cleopatra.
* We know nothing of Arsinoe’s motives, which has not discouraged even the best modern interpreter of the Alexandrian War from speculation: Had she not felt jealous of her older sister’s masterful seduction of Caesar, asserts one historian, “She would not have been a woman.”
† Parthia is today northeastern Iran. The Pontic kingdom extended from the southern shore of the Black Sea into modern Turkey.
* To the Romans the Egyptian worship of animals was unspeakably primitive and perverse. A second-century Christian took a different view. By comparison with the Greek gods, the Egyptian deities fared well. “They may be irrational animals,” conceded Clement of Alexandria, “but still they are not adulterous, they are not lewd, and not one of them seeks for pleasure contrary to its own nature.”
* Their fervor was lost on later Romans. As Dio would write centuries afterward, the Alexandrians were “most ready to assume a bold front everywhere and to speak out whatever may occur to them, but for war and its terrors they are utterly useless.”
* At the same time it is interesting that the general who continues Caesar’s narrative takes such care to emphasize—on his first page and curiously out of context—that the city was fireproof. His assertion contradicts the other early sources, which claim that fire spread from the ships to the docks to the great library. It fails to acknowledge too the masterfully manipulated roofs and beams or the timber barricades of Caesar’s account. We are left with a gratuitous apology, and without an offense.
* The gift was welcome but the timing was awkward. Julia had been set to marry Quintus Servilius Caepio in a matter of days. He was most displeased. In her place, Pompey offered Caepio his own daughter, although she, in turn, was already engaged to someone else. For the most part Roman women were for horse trading, an idea that—for all their creative family machinations—rarely occurred to the Ptolemies.
* One modern historian goes so far as to suggest they expressly covered it up.
* The Sphinx was almost certainly invisible to Caesar and Cleopatra, buried still in sand, as it had been for nearly a thousand years.
* The most common graffito: “I saw, and I was amazed.”