Cleopatra: A Life

CHAPTER I: THAT EGYPTIAN WOMAN

1. “That Egyptian woman”: Florus, II.xxi.11. Translation from Ashton, 2008, 2.

2. “Man’s most valuable”: From Euripides’ “Helen,” in Euripides II: The Cyclops, Heracles, Iphigenia in Tauris, Helen, David Grene and Richmond Lattimore, eds.; Richmond Lattimore, tr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959), 1615.

3. greater prestige: JA, XV.l0l.

4. “either destroy everything”: Sallust, “Letter of Mithradates,” 21.

5. A Roman historian: JA, XIII.408 vs. XIII.430.

6. marriage contract: Rowlandson, 1998, 322.

7. “by being scrupulously chaste”: Dio, LVIII.ii.5.

8. “natural talent for deception”: Cicero to Quintus, 2 (I.2), c. November 59. Cicero had no taste for the “whole tribe” of easterners: “On the contrary I am sick and tired of their fribbling, fawning ways and their minds always fixed on present advantage, never on the right thing to do.”

9. “a loose girl of sixteen”: James Anthony Froude, Caesar: A Sketch (New York: Scribner’s, 1879), 446.

10. “odious extravagance”: Pompey, 24.

11. The historical methods: Writing a good 130 years after C, Josephus attacked the veracity and the methods of his contemporaries: “We have actually had so-called histories even of our recent war published by persons who never visited the sites nor were anywhere near the actions described, but, having put together a few hearsay reports, have, with the gross impudence of drunken revelers, miscalled their productions by the name of history” (Against Apion, I.46). He simultaneously maligned the ancient Greeks for offering contradictory accounts of the same events—after which he proceeded to do so himself.

12. The reliance on memory: The point is K. R. Bradley’s, introduction to Suetonius, Lives of the Caesars I, 14.

13. no plain, unvarnished stories: Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, Suetonius (London: Bristol Classical Press, 2004), 19. See also Fergus Millar, A Study of Cassius Dio (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 28. On the practice of extracting brilliant history from “next to nothing,” T. P. Wiseman, Clio’s Cosmetics: Three Studies in Greco-Roman Literature (Bristol: Bristol Phoenix Press, 1979), 23–53. See also Josephus, Against Apion, I.24–5. All illuminate Quintilian’s first-century AD point: “History is very near to poetry, and may be considered in some sense as poetry in prose.”

14. “the most unfortunate of fathers”: JW, I.556.

15. Hellenistic Age defined: “The Greek world with the Greeks taken out,” Daniel Ogden, The Hellenistic World: New Perspectives (London: Duckworth, 2002), x.

16. “And the endeavor”: Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, I, XXII.4–XXIII.3.