* Like so much else in her life—the Nile cruise, the Roman stay, her good faith at Actium—the paternity of this child and the timing of his birth have been contested. His appearance seemed too good and too opportune to be true. Otherwise the skeptics’ case rests on Caesar’s presumed infertility. Despite a vigorous sex life, he had sired no progeny in thirty-six years. As early as Suetonius the paternity issue was raised; there is a curious silence in the record where one might expect outrage, and, too, an absence of material evidence. That silence can be read equally as affirmation: the birth was so distasteful, the evidence that Cleopatra had hoodwinked Caesar so great, that it was wise to keep the matter quiet. Caesar certainly thought the child his, as did both Antony and Augustus.
* Sounding some familiar, inaccurate notes, a historian of Cleopatra’s day credited Isis with Egypt’s upside-down social hierarchy. In deference to her great wisdoms, claimed Diodorus, the Egyptians had ordained that “the queen should have greater power and honor than the king, and that among private persons the wife should enjoy authority over her husband, the husbands agreeing in the marriage contract that they will be obedient in all things to their wives.”
* The one exception has been shown to have been the police. Though Greek at the higher level and Egyptian at the lower, they made for an egalitarian force, uncommonly efficient and responsive, on occasion even reprimanding officials. They took the law seriously. They also worked more or less autonomously, considerately relieving the Ptolemies of concerns with “stolen donkeys and assaults on grandmothers.”
* On one contemporary list Cleopatra appears as the twenty-second richest person in history, well behind John D. Rockefeller and Tsar Nicholas II, but ahead of Napoleon and J. P. Morgan. She is assigned a net worth of $95.8 billion, or more than three Queen Elizabeth IIs. It is of course impossible accurately to convert currencies across eras.
* The good king was advised to stay home. The poor resented his absence, while—obliged to accompany him—the rich felt forced into exile.
* As Seneca observed: “Easier for two philosophers to agree than two clocks.”
* Plutarch deemed the future King Juba “the most fortunate captive ever taken,” as fate transported him from his “barbarian” land to Rome, where he was educated. He emerged as an eminent historian who wrote on a variety of subjects, from Roman antiquity to mythology to the behavior of elephants.
* Some took Cicero’s distaste further. If a man was an excellent piper, it followed that he was a worthless man. “Otherwise he wouldn’t be so good a piper,” notes Plutarch, quoting approvingly. The axiom did not work to the advantage of Cleopatra’s father. Despite ample evidence to the contrary, he would be written off as “not a real man, but a pipe-player and a charlatan.”
* The prevailing ethos is preserved in the literature. In the Iliad, women are the most perfect things in creation. They are also, as has been observed, as a general rule “teasing, scolding, thwarting, contradicting, and hoodwinking.” In the Greek plays, women have the key parts. There are few outsize female heroines in Roman literature, in which wives come in two varieties: the tyrannical rich and the spendthrift poor. Roman literature is notably short as well on deceived husbands, a comic staple from Aristophanes to Molière.
* As Blaise Pascal asserted in the seventeenth century: “Had Cleopatra’s nose been shorter, the whole face of the world would have been changed.”
* Many have marveled at the tale, but only one man has sacrificed Tiffany pearls to a laboratory investigation of it. Does a pearl actually disintegrate in vinegar? Yes, if very slowly, reported B. L. Ullman, who in the end resorted to heat to nudge his 1956 experiment along: “When I boiled a pearl for 33 minutes the vinegar boiled off while I was reading a detective story. I can still smell that vinegar. The pearl seemed not to be affected, though I thought it looked a trifle peaked.” He got better results with stronger vinegar, the best results with pulverized pearl, which dissolved after three hours and twenty minutes of closely monitored boiling. This is the kind of thing to which Cleopatra has driven scholars. To the question of why Cleopatra (or anyone) might have attempted such a display in the first place—surely it made more dramatic sense to swallow the gem whole?—Ullman reminds us that pearls consist primarily of carbonate of lime, the ancient world’s bicarbonate of soda. They make an effective, if expensive, antacid.
* He was unapologetic, the more so as he was in the midst of his grief feverishly productive. He defied those “happy souls” who begrudged him his mourning to so much as read half the pages that he, in his misery, had written.
* There was plenty of precedent for this brand of inexactitude. Alexander the Great threw a festival to celebrate his conquest of India, which doubtless surprised the bedraggled, half-starved men who had barely survived that mission, having accomplished no such thing.
* This happened by necessity in the best of families, Plutarch assures us, monarchy being “so utterly unsociable a thing.” The rules for dispensing with fellow royals were, he held, as inflexible as those of geometry.
* Florence Nightingale was among those who marveled at the parallels between the Osiris and Christ stories. In Upper Egypt she sat spellbound through a Sunday morning in an Isis temple, one largely decorated by Cleopatra’s father. Few places had felt to her so sacred: “I cannot describe to you the feeling at Philae,” she wrote her family in 1850. “The myths of Osiris are so typical of our Saviour that it seemed to me as if I were coming to a place where He had lived—like going to Jerusalem; and when I saw a shadow in the moonlight in the temple court, I thought, ‘perhaps I shall see him: now he is there.’ ”
* She would be accused of having withheld distributions from the city’s Jews, which is unlikely. Customarily the Jews were loyal supporters of the female Ptolemies. They were river guards, police officers, army commanders, and high-ranking officials. They had fought for Auletes; they numbered among Cleopatra’s supporters in the desert in 48. And they had fought for her during the Alexandrian War, at the end of which Caesar had granted them citizenship.
* To complicate matters, there were both assassins and would-be assassins, who—the French Resistance fighters of their day—enlisted after the fact. Also to complicate matters, Lepidus and Cassius were brothers-in-law. Both were related by marriage as well to Brutus.
* A truly eloquent man is the one who can argue both sides of a case with equal finesse. “And so, if by chance you find anyone who despises the sight of beautiful things,” Cicero noted in the same speech, “whom neither scent nor touch nor taste seduces, whose ears are deaf to all sweet sounds—such a man I, perhaps, and some few will account heaven’s favorite, but most the object of its wrath.” As it happened, Cicero lived in one of the grandest mansions in the grandest quarters of Rome, for which he had paid an astronomical sum. And while he was pleased that one of his villas had “an air of high thinking that rebukes the wild extravagance of other country houses,” he had to admit that an addition to it would be awfully nice.
* One wife hit on a particularly ingenious solution: she secreted her husband off to the coast in a hemp or leather sack, the kind into which Cleopatra had crawled.