by M. J. Trow
Mrs Jameson was fully aware of the 1830s’ limitations of female power and even rights. As she was writing, the eighteen-year-old Victoria was struggling through the first year of her reign. She was arguably the most powerful woman in the world and the same age as Cleopatra when she assumed that position in 48 BC. But Victoria was surrounded by male advisers, a male Privy Council, a male parliament and those few allowed to vote for her political parties were all men. So natural is this order of things, says Mrs Jameson, that when a bizarre collection of circumstances leads to female rule, the female in question is always in extremis just trying to cope. She cites Christina of Sweden, ‘the acute Elizabeth’ [the First, of England], the ‘haughty energetic Catherine’ [the Great, of Russia], the ‘stupid, heartless Anne’ [of England] and the ‘amiable’ [Austrian Empress] Maria Theresa. She concludes, rather sadly, that the rules of these queens and others she includes in this book have been either ‘conspicuously unhappy or criminal’ and that female government is not ‘properly or naturally that of the sceptre or the sword’. Did she really believe this? Why not – she was a woman of her times. Victoria may have been the most powerful woman in the world, but she deferred constantly to her male supporters – her uncle Leopold of the Belgians, her husband Prince Albert, her Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli. It was the way of things.
And so Mrs Jameson is scathing of Cleopatra – ‘as a woman, she can scarcely be said to claim either our sympathy or our respect; as a sovereign, she neither achieved great exploits nor great conquests’. But she has to agree that Cleopatra left behind a name that ‘still acts as a spell upon the fancy’. While acknowledging the classical authors’ writings on Cleopatra’s lovely voice and philosophical learning, Mrs Jameson adds that she was ‘dissembling, ambitious, vain, perverse and utterly unprincipled’. This was 1838 and Mrs Jameson has to be coy about the Cleopatra/Caesar relationship. No sacrifice was too great for Cleopatra, however, including ‘her sex’s honour’, and later her enemies ‘could easily guess at the means by which Cleopatra had seduced her judge’.
She does not believe that Cleopatra had her own brother Ptolemy XIV murdered to clear the way for Caesarion. There is no direct evidence for it and it ‘bespeaks a heart more completely hardened against the natural affections than Cleopatra ever exhibited’. She was not warlike but ruled by ‘policy and prudence’.
Mrs Jameson is dismissive of Antony, too. He was the ‘arbitrator of her fate and he ended by becoming the veriest slave that was ever chained to a woman’s footstool’. He was ‘a magnificent, reckless libertine, a valiant but a coarse soldier’. True to form, Cleopatra is the villainess of Actium, losing her nerve and hoisting her sails with the feckless Antony, made mad by the gods out to destroy him, following suit. The author does concede, however, that the queen easily duped Octavian – ‘she had seen through his mean designs and his deep disguises’.
Anna Jameson follows Plutarch with a grim determination perhaps to prove that women were just as good historians as men. She was writing at the end of the antiquarian period when any kind of folk tale was believed and before history became critical and a matter of interpretation. Her conclusion, however, is interesting because it transcends all that – ‘thus perished this celebrated woman [she goes with the asp poisoning] whose character exhibits such an extraordinary mixture of grandeur and littleness and whose life and fate present something so wildly magnificent to the fancy, that we dare not try her by the usual rules of conduct’. We must leave her as we find her – ‘a dazzling piece of witchcraft’.
Not until 1914 was there a balanced thesis that put her into the context of Egyptian history. It was The Life and Times of Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt, written by the archaeologist Arthur Weigall. This is a real attempt for the first time to see her as she really was – ‘an often lonely and sorely tried woman, who fought all her life for the fulfilment of a patriotic and splendid ambition ...’84
Look on the Internet today and you will find over 18,000,000 sites devoted to Cleopatra. You can buy make-up, wigs, necklaces and even lingerie. You can play slot games and read about various exhibitions you’ll kick yourself for having missed. Nobody has tried, as far as I am aware, to turn Cleopatra into a feminist icon – her story is too wound up with men for that. Only a few scholars share the view of the Arab traveller Al-Masudi from the seventh century – ‘She was a sage, a philosopher, who elevated the ranks of scholars and enjoyed their company.’85 Most people believe she was Egyptian and many are still ready to accept the Roman libel, brilliantly summed up by historian Joyce Tyldesley – ‘Cleopatra ... was to be remembered as that immoral foreign woman. Almost overnight she became the most frightening of Roman stereotypes; an unnatural woman. A woman who worshipped crude gods, dominated men, slept with her brothers and gave birth to bastards. A woman foolish enough to think she might one day rule Rome and devious enough to lure a decent man [Caesar or Antony, Octavian or Herod, take your pick] away from his hearth and home.’86
Stacy Schiff summarizes superbly too – ‘Many people have spoken for her, including the greatest playwrights and poets; we have been putting words in her mouth for two thousand years. In one of the busiest afterlives in history, she has gone on to become an asteroid, a video game, a cliché, a cigarette, a slot machine, a strip club, a synonym for Elizabeth Taylor. Shakespeare attested to Cleopatra’s infinite variety. He had no idea.’87
And in the end, in a way, Cleopatra has won. She has survived the scurrilous attacks on her, which called her harlot, witch, sorceress, fatale monstrum. But she has survived the probing intrusions of the good guys, too, those of us, historians, archaeologists and the rest, who have tried to find the truth about her. ‘So far,’ says the website of the recent Cleopatra Exhibition at the Franklin Institute, Philadelphia, ‘the real last queen of Egypt has eluded everyone.’
NOTES
1 The top section collapsed in AD 796 and subsequent earthquakes over the centuries flattened it. The fifteenth-century fortress of Sultan Quait Bey stands on the site today.
2 The name means seven stades (1 stade = 600 feet).
3 Philo Embassy to Gaius 149–51 trans. F. H. Coulson, quoted in Tyldesley p 93.
4 It must have been rather like the gigantic palace of the dictator Nicolai Ceausescu in Bucharest. Only the centre of this vast building is still used as government offices; the rest is one huge, echoing mausoleum to a failed regime.
5 Strabo quoted in Barry Cunliffe Rome and Her Empire p 232.
6 Suchos was the Greek name for Sobek, the crocodile-god.
7 Strabo quoted in Barry Cunliffe Rome and Her Empire p 233.
8 Strabo quoted in Barry Cunliffe Rome and Her Empire p 233.
9 These terms are arbitrary and designed to help with understanding. They do not conform exactly to what is a notoriously controversial classification in the modern world.
10 Guy de la Bédoyère Gods with Thunderbolts; Religion in Roman Britain (Stroud: Tempus, 2002) p 16.
11 Plato quoted in Fletcher p 29.
12 Although Alexander’s detractors point out that his astonishing campaign’s success against the Persians was achieved by only three battles – Granicus (334), Issus (333) and Gaugamala (331).
13 Arrian (ad 86–160) History of Events After Alexander quoted in Fletcher p 38.
14 In the twentieth century, the embalmed body of Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov (Lenin) held a similarly sacred place in the hearts of his followers with queues filing past it in Moscow’s Red Square every day.
15 Although her daughter called herself Cleopatra Selene (the moon) she did not rule Egypt as her mother had done.
16 Herodotus II 46, quoted in Fletcher p 49.
17 All this is highly dubious. Today’s African elephants are larger, not smaller than their Indian counterparts and are notoriously difficult to train, so accounts of their role at Raphia must be taken with more than a pinch of salt.
18 Quoted in Fletcher p 55.
19 The instrument was more like an oboe than a flute
, but both versions are used in Auletes’ context.
20 The information in this section comes from Motherhood and Childbirth in Pharaonic Egypt S. Ashoush and A. Fahmy, Lectures in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, Ain Shams University.
21 Quoted in Fletcher p 57.
22 Livy History of Rome 1.31
23 Plutarch Lives – Numa XVII, quoted in Anthony Kamm The Romans (London: Routledge, 1995) p 9.
24 Livy History of Rome 1.49.
25 Cicero The Laws III.3 quoted in Kamm p 10.
26 Livy History of Rome X5.
27 Vegetus, quoted in Hughes and Forrest The Romans Discover Britain (CUP, 1981) p 35.
28 This is not an original term; it means segmented breastplate but we have no idea what the Romans called it.
29 Quoted in Philip Matyszak The Chronicle of the Roman Republic p 165.
30 The father of Shakespeare’s Enobarbus.
31 The Oscan language is an early form of Latin.
32 Quoted in Matyszak Chronicle of the Roman Republic p 201.
33 Ibid.
34 Legions’ marching song, Suetonius Life of Caesar, quoted in Matyszak p 200.
35 See Tom Holland, Rubicon.
36 Cicero – Second Oration Against Catiline quoted in Matyszak p 213.
37 Quoted in Fletcher Cleopatra the Great p 80.
38 Funerary stela quoted in Tyldesley p 42.
39 Plutarch, Life of Caesar ch 15.
40 Petronius, Who’s Who in the Roman World (London: Routledge, 2001).
41 Holland, Rubicon p 309.
42 The name given to the hob-nailed sandal worn by soldiers.
43 Quoted in Matyszak p 207.
44 Plutarch Pompey trans Rex Warner p 241.
45 Ibid.
46 This is indeed how it was done in Carry On Cleo (1964) with Amanda Barrie as the queen and Kenneth Williams as Caesar.
47 Stacy Schiff Cleopatra, A Life (Virgin, 2010) p 241 taken from Lucan.
48 The Roman term for the Mediterranean was mare nostrum, our sea.
49 By the English explorers Speke, Burton and Baker in the 1860s and 1870s.
50 This is evidenced from a stela now in the Louvre, Paris, and is not necessarily accurate as it refers to ‘king Caesar’, a title given to Caesarion nowhere else.
51 Most commentators today translate this as a telegram – ‘came; saw; conquered’. For those of us old enough to have ‘done’ Latin at school, this is nonsense. The ‘I’ is understood in this part of speech.
52 There were several of these in late republican Rome. The colosseum had yet to be built.
53 Re-enactments like this were still taking place in circuses into the twentieth century. In Britain the Royal Tournament at London’s Earl’s Court is a survivor of this sort of entertainment.
54 Cicero Letters to Atticus 15:15.2 trans L. P. Wilkinson 1972.
55 As described by Suetonius, Appian and Plutarch, but it may be pure legend.
56 There is a long tradition of royal survival in history, with Arthur sleeping under his hill until his country needs him and the tsarevitch Alexei surviving the hail of bullets in the House of Special Purpose at Ekaterinburg in 1918.
57 Erik Durschmied The Hinge Factor: How Chance and Stupidity Have Changed History (London Coronet, 1999).
58 See Chapter 15.
59 Cicero, quoted in Schiff p 151.
60 Quoted in Schiff p 150.
61 The lack of stirrups in the ancient world made cavalry less impressive than it became later with them. A recent television mini-series used stirrups on the grounds of health and safety!
62 I believe the same is true of Vespasian who took Vectis, the Isle of Wight, in AD 43. There is no evidence of any opposition from the islanders.
63 Cicero Ad Atticus 7, 8.
64 Except perhaps ‘genistho’.
65 Cicero Ad Atticus 10, 10.
66 For all his Greekness, Plutarch was essentially as Roman a writer as Josephus, the Jewish chronicler who ‘came over to Rome’ in the first century AD.
67 Goldsworthy Antony and Cleopatra p 273.
68 Which is why, partly, Rome was so horrified by Boudicca in AD 60. The woman actually led her warriors in person.
69 Suetonius Augustus 69.
70 In the 1963 film, Roddy McDowell’s Octavian went one better and hurled the spear into the heart of Cleopatra’s ambassador.
71 Quoted in Schiff p 243.
72 Cassius Dio The Reign of Augustus trans Ian Scott-Kilvert, Penguin p 59.
73 Cassius Dio The Reign of Augustus trans Ian Scott-Kilvert, Penguin p 61.
74 Horace Odes Book I No 37 1914 trans. Quoted in History of Quotations, Cohen and Major.
75 Cassius Dio Histories 51:15 trans E. Cary.
76 Josephus Against Apion.
77 Selgado. No source.
78 To Helen 1845
79 Carlo Maria Franzero The Life and Times of Cleopatra quoted in Joyce Tyldesley p 216.
80 Fraser Hollywood History of the World p 18.
81 There are huge gaps in the royal tomb record. The vast majority of the Ptolemies were buried in Alexandria, yet none of their bodies has been conclusively found. Likewise, we have no clear idea what became of the body of Alexander the Great after its removal from the Soma.
82 Goldsworthy, Antony and Cleopatra (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2010) p 395.
83 All quotations from Jameson Memoirs of Celebrated Female Sovereigns 1838 pp 31–57.
84 Arthur Weigall 1924 ed vi.
85 Al-Masudi, quoted in Tyldesley p 212.
86 Joyce Tyldesley, p 206.
87 Stacy Schiff Cleopatra, A Life p 1.
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INDEX
Acarnania 196
Achillas 107, 115, 122, 123, 196
Actium, battle of 6, 195, 196–8, 207
Aeneas 61, 62, 89, 210
Aeneid 210
Aequians 63, 71
Agathoclea 39, 41
agriculture 14–15
Agrippa, Marcus Vipsanius 194, 197
Agrippina (mother of Nero) 36
Ahenobarbus, Gaius Domitius 83, 98, 100, 111, 178, 191, 194, 217
Ahenobarbus, Lucius Domitius 165
Al-Masudi 236
Alaric the Visigoth 111
Alesia, battle of 108, 164
Alexander of Macedon (the Great) 4–5, 19–21, 31–2, 33, 34, 53, 123, 127, 211
belief in own divinity 23, 24
crowned pharaoh 23, 32
death of 29–30, 32
tomb 6–7, 40
Alexander IV 31, 33
Alexander Helios 181, 187, 209
Alexandria 4–8, 12, 32, 38–9, 40, 48, 107, 116, 118, 125, 148, 229
founding of 4–5, 32
Great Caesarium 7, 148
