Cleopatra: A Life

Notes

THE DEAD ENDS and missing pieces in Cleopatra’s story have worked a paradoxical effect; they have kept us relentlessly coming back for more. To centuries of literature on the last queen of Egypt add a recent surge in fine Hellenistic scholarship; a catalogue of the secondary sources would easily amount to a fat volume of its own. I have opted not to write it. Where much material has been distilled into little, chapter headnotes indicate central texts. Volumes that have shaped the narrative as a whole—the ones I have pulled most frequently from the shelf—appear in the selected bibliography. Those texts are cited here by author’s last name and publication date. Primary sources and periodicals appear exclusively below. Footnotes offer an occasional elaboration on a theme.

Translations of the Greek or Latin are from the Loeb Classical Library unless noted and with three general exceptions: For Appian and for Caesar’s Civil War I have used John Carter’s fluid translations (Penguin, 1996, and Oxford, 1998, respectively). For Lucan I have drawn from Susan H. Braund’s 2008 Oxford University Press edition. Where translations differ markedly from published texts I am grateful to Inger Kuin, who untangled awkward phrasings and reconciled contradictory ones. Cleopatra VII, Julius Caesar, and Mark Antony are abbreviated as C, CR, and A. Names of principal sources are rendered as follows:

Appian

Appian,

The Civil Wars

Athenaeus

Athenaeus,

The Learned Banqueters

AA

Augustus,

Res Gestae Divi Augustus (The Acts of Augustus)

AW

Caesar,

Alexandrian War

CW

Caesar,

The Civil War

Cicero

Cicero’s letters

Dio

Dio Cassius,

Roman History

Diodorus

Diodorus of Sicily,

Library of History

Florus

Florus,

Epitome of Roman History

JA

Josephus,

Jewish Antiquities

JW

Josephus,

The Jewish War

Lucan

Lucan,

Civil War

ND

Nicolaus of Damascus,

Life of Augustus

Pausanias

Pausanias,

Description of Greece

NH

Pliny,

Natural History

Flatterer

Plutarch, “How to Tell a Flatterer from a Friend,”

Moralia

MA

Plutarch,

Lives,

“Antony”

JC

Plutarch,

Lives,

“Caesar”

Pompey

Plutarch,

Lives,

“Pompey”

Quintilian

Quintilian,

The Orator’s Education

Strabo

Strabo,

Geography

DA

Suetonius,

The Deified Augustus

(

Lives of the Caesars

)

DJ

Suetonius,

The Deified Julius

(

Lives of the Caesars

)

Valerius

Valerius Maximus,

Memorable Doings and Sayings

VP

Velleius Paterculus,

Compendium of Roman History