by Stacy Schiff
42. On hieroglyphs: John Baines, “Literacy and Ancient Egyptian Society,” Man 18, no. 3 (1983): 572–99.
43. On the population: Estimates range from 3 million (Thompson, 1988) to 6 million (Walter Schiedel, Death on the Nile [Leiden: Brill, 2001]) to 10 million (Grant, 2004); the Loeb editors (Diodorus, I) and Fraser (1972, II, 171–2) prefer 7 million. In the first century AD Josephus estimated the population of Egypt excluding Alexandria to be 7.5 million. Diodorus gives Alexandria a population of some 500,000, which seems plausible; Fraser prefers 1 million. See Roger S. Bagnall and Bruce W. Frier, The Demography of Roman Egypt (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
44. seven nationalities: Mostafa El-Abbadi, The Life and Fate of the Ancient Library of Alexandria (Paris: Unesco, 1990), 45.
45. “unlike that of”: Herodotus, 1997, IV.clxxxii.
46. “It was a pleasure”: MA, XXVII (ML translation).
47. a very similar Greek: On the koine of C and CR, interview with Dorothy Thompson, April 22, 2008; Geoffrey C. Horrocks, Greek: A History of the Language and Its Speakers (New York: Longman, 1997), 33–108.
48. “The better one gets”: Cicero, quoting his grandfather, On the Orator, 2:17–18, translation from Gruen, 1984, I, 262.
49. sex manuals: Andrew Dalby, Empire of Pleasures: Luxury and Indulgence in the Roman World (London: Routledge, 2000), 123.
50. “with fingers of its own”: Juvenal, Satire 6, 200.
51. “including some I should not care”: Quintilian, 1.8.6. He was referring in particular to Horace.
52. “extremely learned”: Cited in Lionel Casson, Libraries in the Ancient World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 78.
53. “She loved her husband”: Cited in M. I. Finley, Aspects of Antiquity (London: Chatto, 1968), 142.
54. “highly educated”: Pompey, LV.1–2 (ML translation).
55. “she was a woman”: Sallust, War with Catiline, XXV. Notes Cicero approvingly of a good Roman matron: “There was never a topic she thought she knew well enough.” Clement of Alexandria inventories female intellectuals in The Stromata, 4.19, citing especially the cake bakers among them.
56. On the library and museum: Roger S. Bagnall, “Alexandria: Library of Dreams,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 146, no. 4 (December 2002): 348–62; Casson, 2001; El-Abbadi, 1990; Andrew Erskine, “Culture and Power in Ptolemaic Egypt: The Museum and Library of Alexandria,” Greece & Rome 42, no. 1 (April 1995): 38–48. Fraser I, 1972, 452; Roy MacLeod, The Library of Alexandria (London: Tauris, 2000). Frederic C. Kenyon offers a fine guide to the scrolls themselves, Books and Readers in Ancient Greece and Rome (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932). A volume of Plato’s Symposium, notes Kenyon, might be twenty-three feet long.
57. “he’s either dead”: Cited in Marrou, 1956, 145.
58. CR’s fondness for pearls: DJ, XLVII.
59. “braver than all the men”: Manetho, The History of Egypt, Fr. 21b (Armenian version of Eusebius).
60. only one Latin poet: Lucan, X.60–1.
61. “was not in itself” to “bewitching”: MA, XXVII.2–3 (ML translation).
62. “striking,” exquisite: Dio, XLII.xxxiv.4. The sixth-century AD Byzantine writer John Malalas also extols her beauty.
63. “famous for nothing”: Boccaccio, cited in Walker and Higgs, 2001, 147.
CHAPTER III: CLEOPATRA CAPTURES THE OLD MAN BY MAGIC
For the Alexandrian War, Appian, Dio, CR, Lucan, and Plutarch, with caution. The finest modern source remains Paul Graindor, La guerre d’Alexandrie (Le Caire: Société Anonyme Egyptienne, 1931). It should be noted that CR and his ghostwriter offer the sole contemporary accounts of the war.
No one is better on Auletes and his travails than Mary Siani-Davies, especially her “Ptolemy XII Auletes and the Romans,” Historia 46 (1997): 306–40; reprinted, in slightly different form, in Cicero’s Speech: Pro Rabirio Postumo (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), 1–38. See also Dio, XXXIX.xiii–xv and liv–lix; Herwig Maehler, “Egypt under the Last Ptolemies,” Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies 30 (1983): 1–19. On the restoration, Dio, Plutarch, and most pointedly Cicero; Israel Shatzman’s fine “The Egyptian Question in Roman Politics,” Latomus 30 (1971): 363–9; Richard S. Williams, “Rei Publicae Causa: Gabinius’s Defense of His Restoration of Auletes,” Classical Journal 81, no. 1 (1985): 25–38.
For CR’s Egyptian stay and the Nile cruise: Appian, Dio, Diodorus, Pliny, Strabo, Suetonius, Tacitus. I have relied a great deal on Victoria Ann Foertmeyer’s especially fine “Tourism in Graeco-Roman Egypt” (Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University, 1989). Also: Abdullatif A. Aly, “Cleopatra and Caesar at Alexandria and Rome,” Roma e l’Egitto nell’antichita classica, Atti del I Congresso Internazionale Italo-Egiziano (1989): 47–61; Lionel Casson, 1974, 256–91; Casson, Ships and Seamanship in the Ancient World (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971); T. W. Hillard, “The Nile Cruise of Cleopatra and Caesar,” Classical Quarterly 52, no. 2 (2002): 549–54; Louis E. Lord, “The Date of Julius Caesar’s Departure from Alexandria,” Journal of Roman Studies 28 (1930): 19–40; J. Grafton Milne, “Greek and Roman Tourists in Egypt,” Journal of Egyptian Archeology 3, 2/3 (1916): 76–80; Neal, 1975, 19–33; Thompson, “Hellenistic Royal Barges,” unpublished talk, Athens, 2009. The point of the trip: Willy Clarysse, “The Ptolemies Visiting the Egyptian Chora,” in Politics, Administration and Society in the Hellenistic and Roman World, Leon Mooren, ed., Bertinoro Colloquium (Leuven, Belgium: Peeters, 2000), 33–40. For winds, weather, wildlife: Sophia Poole’s vivid The Englishwoman in Egypt (Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 2003). For the second-century account of Lucius Memmius’s visit: George Milligan, ed., Selections from the Greek Papyri (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1910), 29–31.
1. Cleopatra captures the old man: A variation on Lucan, 360.
2. “A woman who is generous”: Quintilian, V.11.27.
3. “captivated” to “overcome”: Plutarch, XLIX (ML translation).
4. “to such an extent” to “assumed to be”: Dio, XLII.xxxiv.ii–xxv–ii.
5. “on the condition”: JC, XLIX (ML translation).
6. They assumed that they had signed: Florus, II.xiii.55–6.
7. a blundering sixth-century AD account: Chronicle of John Malalas, Books VIII–XVIII (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1940), 25.
8. depleted legions: A. B. Bosworth supplies an idea of their exhaustion, “Alexander the Great and the Decline of Macedon,” The Journal of Hellenic Studies 106 (1986): 1–12.
9. “promised to do”: Dio, XLII, xxxv.4.
10. “ability to inflame”: Cicero, Brutus, LXXX.279.
11. “particularly anxious”: CW, III.109.
12. “had given the kingdom”: Dio, XLII.xxxvi.3.
13. “busy, listening fellow” to “embarrassing war”: JC, XLIX (ML translation).
14. “a man of remarkable nerve”: CW, III.104.
15. “that the royal name”: CW, III.109.
16. Arsinoe burned with ambition: By one account (Strabo, 17.1.11) the two sisters had escaped together to Syria during the earlier uprising.
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.
53. every visitor to Hellenistic Egypt: As Braund (1984, 79) notes: “The wise king was a lavish host when Romans came to visit.”
54. “in view of Caesar’s favor”: Dio, XLII.xxxiv.3.
55. “For the ruler labors”: Ibid., LV.xv.5–6.
56. “the first city of the civilized”: Diodorus, XVII.52.4. Even Cicero conceded as much, De Lege Agraria, II, XVI, 44.
57. “Looking at the city”: Achilles Tatius, V.i.6. He was a native son.
58. “It is not easy”: Dio Chrysostom, “The 32nd Discourse, To the People of Alexandria, 20,” in Alexandria: The Site and the History. Cited in Gareth L. Steen, ed. (New York: New York University Press, 1993), 58.
59. “The general rule”: Athenaeus, V.196d.
60. three hundred tons of dinner vessels: Ibid., 453.
61. “ordinary ware”: The point is Thompson’s, from “Athenaeus’s Egyptian Background,” in David Braund and John Wilkins, eds., Athenaeus and His World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 83–4. See Athenaeus, VI.229d.
62. “a silver platter”: Athenaeus, IV.129b.
63. On C’s wardrobe: Interview with Larissa Bonfante, February 2, 2009; interview with Norma Goldman, October 19, 2009; Casson, 2001, 24–5; Rowlandson, 1998, 313–34; Stanwick, 2002, 36–7, Dorothy Burr Thompson, Ptolemaic Oinochoai and Portraits in Faience (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), 29–30; Susan Walker and Morris Bierbrier, Ancient Faces: Mummy Portraits from Roman Egypt (London: British Museum Press, 1997), 177–80; Walker and Higgs, 2001, 65.
64. “prolonged parties until dawn”: DJ, LII (translation modified). Similarly Frontinus, Stratagems, I.i.5. Plutar
ch has CR drinking until dawn in order to ward off assassination attempts, JC, XLVIII.
65. Dionysian procession: For the best dissection of Athenaeus, V.197–203, see E. E. Rice, The Grand Procession of Ptolemy Philadelphus (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983). Thompson, “Philadelphus’s Procession: Dynastic Power in a Mediterranean Context,” in Mooren, 2000, 365–88. Thompson emphasizes that such a procession was meant to unite the populace and promote a sense of civic identity. Arrian, XXVIII, notes the triumph’s Dionysian roots.
66. “the shrewdest amasser”: Appian, preface, 10. The translation is Macurdy’s, 1932, 108.
67. Had Auletes married C to CR: Ptolemy VIII had tried unsuccessfully to woo a (rich) Roman woman, Cornelia, mother of the Gracchi, Plutarch, Tiberius Gracchus, I.
68. “Cleopatra has been able” to “gain Rome”: Lucan, X, 359–60.
69. “surrendered to Alexander”: Justin: Epitome of the Philippic History of Pompeius Trogus, J. C. Yardley, tr.
70. “she had a thousand”: Plutarch, MA, XXIX (ML translation).
71. Such an unsociable: Plutarch, “Demetrius,” III. By its very definition, empire made a mockery of family relations, inviting “ill-will and distrust.”
72. “everything that lifts people”: Dio, XXXVIII.xxxix.2.
73. “There is nothing”: Lucan, X.189–90. Egypt exerted no less of a spell on the Greeks, before and after C; it was the ultimate land of mystery. See E. Marion Smith, “The Egypt of the Greek Romances,” Classical Journal 23, no. 7 (April 1928): 531–7.
74. “the father of yellow journalism”: Robert Graves, introduction to Lucan, Pharsalia: Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars (New York: Penguin, 1956), 13.
75. “received with the utmost”: Letter of 112 BC, Select Papyri, II, 416 (George Milligan translation).
76. The Nile cruise: The dates remain in dispute. Lord, 1930, doubts the cruise altogether.
77. One modern historian goes so far: Heinen, 2009, 127. “It seems as if the author [of The Alexandrian War] knowingly sought to deceive his readers, and attempted not only to conceal the Nile journey, but to represent the chronological sequence of events in such a way that this episode could never have taken place.”