Cleo by Stacy

 Even when
they are neither tendentious nor tangled, the accounts are often over-
blown. As has been noted, there were no plain, unvarnished stories in
antiquity. The point was to dazzle. I have not attempted to fill in the
blanks, though on occasion I have corralled the possibilities. What
looks merely probable remains here merely probable—though opin-
ions differ radically even on the probabilities. The irreconcilable
remains unreconciled. Mostly I have restored context. Indeed Cleopa-
tra murdered her siblings, but Herod murdered his children. (He
afterward wailed that he was "the most unfortunate of fathers”) And
as Plutarch reminds us, such behavior was axiomatic among sovereigns.
(Even the fiction writers cannot agree about Caesar and Cleopatra. He loves her (Han-
del) he loves her not (Shaw); he loves her (Thornton Wilder)).
 Cleopatra was not necessarily beautiful, but her wealth’— and
her palace—left a Roman gasping. All read very differently on one
side of the Mediterranean from the other. The last decades of research
on women in antiquity and on Hellenistic Egypt substantially illumi-
nate the picture. I have tried to pluck the gauze of melodrama from
the final scenes of the life, which reduce even sober chroniclers to
soap opera. Sometimes high drama prevails for a reason, however.
Cleopatra’s was an era of outsize, intriguing personalities. At-its end
the greatest actors of the age exit abruptly. A world comes crashing
down after them.
WHILE THERE IS a great deal We do not know about Cleopatra, there
is a great deal she did not know either. She knew neither that she was
living in the first century BC nor in the Hellenistic Age, both of them
later constructs. (The Hellenistic Age begins with the death of Alex-
ander the Great in 323 BC and ends in 30 BC, with the death of Cleopa-
tra. It has been perhaps best defined as a Greek era in which the Greeks
played no role.) She did not know she was Cleopatra VII for several
reasons, one ofwhich is that she was actually the sixth Cleopatra. She
never knew anyone named Octavian. The man who vanquished and
deposed her, prompted her suicide, and largely packaged her for pos-
terity was born Gaius Octavius. By the time he entered Cleopatra’s
life in a meaningful way he called himself Gaius Julius Caesar, after
his illustrious great-uncle, her lover, who adopted him in his will. We
know him today as Augustus, a title he assumed only three years after
Cleopatra’s death. He appears here as Octavian, two Caesars remain-
ing, as ever, one too many.

and

BEHIND EVERY GREAT fortune, it has been noted, is a crime; the Ptole-
mies were fabulously rich. They were descended not from the Egyp-
tian pharaohs whose place they assumed but from the scrappy,
hard-living Macedonians (tough terrain breeds tough men, Herodo-
tus had already warned) who produced Alexander the Great. Within
months of Alexander’s death, Ptolemy—the most enterprising of his
generals, his official taster, a childhood intimate, and by some
accounts a distant relative—had laid claim to Egypt. In an early dis-
play of the family gift for stagecraft, Ptolemy kidnapped Alexander
the Great’s body. It had been headed for Macedonia. Would it not be
far more useful, reasoned young Ptolemy, intercepting the funeral
cortege, in Egypt, ultimately in Alexandria, a city the great man had
founded only decades earlier? There it was rerouted, to be displayed
in a gold sarcophagus at the center of the city, a relic, a talisman, a
recruiting aid, an insurance policy. (By Cleopatra’s childhood, the sar-
cophagus was alabaster or glass. Strapped for funds, her great-uncle
had traded the original for an army. He paid for the substitution with
his life.)
The legitimacy of the Ptolemaic dynasty would rest on this tenu-
ous connection to the most storied figure in the ancient world, the
one against whom all aspirants measured themselves, in whose man-
tle Pompey had wrapped himself, Whose feats were said to reduce
Caesar to tears of inadequacy. The cult was universal. Alexander
played as active a role in the Ptolemaic imagination as in the Roman
one. Many Egyptian homes displayed statues of him. So strong was
his romance—and so fungible was first-century history—that it
would come to include a version in which Alexander descended from
an Egyptian wizard. Soon enough he was said to have been related to
the royal family; like all self-respecting arrivistes, the Ptolemies had a
gift for reconfiguring history.* Without renouncing their Macedonian
heritage, the dynasty’s founders bought themselves a legitimacy-
conferring past, the ancient~world equivalent of the mail-order coat of
arms. What was true was that Ptolemy descended from the Macedo-
nian aristocracy, a synonym for high drama. As a consequence, no
one in Egypt considered Cleopatra to be Egyptian. She hailed instead
from a line of rancorous, meddlesome, shrewd, occasionally unhinged
Macedonian queens, a line that included the fourth-century Olym-
pias, whose greatest contribution to the world was her son, Alexander
the Great. The rest were atrocities.
‘If outside Egypt the Ptolemies held to the Alexander the Great nar-
rative within the country their legitimacy derived from a fabricated
link with the pharaohs. This justified the practice of sibling marriage,
Understood to be an Egyptian custom. Amid the Macedonian aristoc-
racy there was ample precedent for murdering your sibling, none for
marrying her. Nor was there a Greek word for “incest.” The Ptolemies
carried the practice to an extreme.
*
Alexander the Great consulted a famed oracle about his parentage. He had some
 questions, which is what happens when your mother is said to have mated with a snake.
Wisely he left his entourage outside the
ttmple and submitted a bribe in advance. he was, the oracle assured him, the son of Zeus.