A Natural History of Love Read Free Page A

mainly Greek. However, a purely incestuous line of descent would have produced frail and feebleminded offspring, whereas freshening the gene pool by only one indiscretion would be enough to ensure some genetic variety and healthy offspring. In all likelihood, royal women occasionally became pregnant by outsiders. So it’s safest to say that Cleopatra was mainly Greek, but she may have been a mélange of other ancestries as well.
    Although writers and artists of her time described her in much detail, those accounts have vanished. What survives is Plutarch’s biography, written two hundred years later, based on the memoirs of people who saw or met her. They reported that she was not pretty but very charming, with a strong personality and a musical voice. Her portrait on Egyptian coins minted during her reign was bound to have been flattering; no artist would have wanted to insult the queen, and she wouldn’t have wished her subjects to carry around unflattering likenesses of her. The woman whose profile we find in relief on those coins has a large hooked nose, bony face, sharply pointed chin, big eyes, and a rather narrow forehead. Second-guessing beauty in ancient days in distant lands is not a game for the faint of heart.
    What she had was style. Glamorous and dramatic, Cleopatra was a one-woman pageant. Silks and perfumes, veils and precious stones, exotic makeup and ornate coiffures, fawning slaves and sinewy dancers—all were part of her repertoire and retinue. When she wanted to impress her own people or visiting Romans, she produced elaborate ceremonies on land and sea, wore opulent clothes, knew just what tableau to stage. She might have written stirring speeches instead, and indeed some books have been credited to her, but most of her people were illiterate, and she needed to express herself in a way that would transcend the written word, and also not require much translation. She chose a dramatic, full-body hieroglyphics, in which nothing was spoken but much was understood. Plutarch reports that, when she sailed to Tarsus to meet Antony, she arrived on a scented barge of purple and gold, dressed as Aphrodite (the Greek goddess of sexual love), with boys as cupids fanning her.
Her rowers caressed the water with oars of silver which dipped in time to the music of the flute, accompanied by pipes and lutes…. Instead of a crew the barge was lined with the most beautiful of her waiting women attired as Nereids and Graces, some at the rudders, others at the tackles of the sails, and all the while an indescribably rich perfume, exhaled from innumerable censers, was wafted from the vessel to the river banks.
    Sometimes merged with Isis, Egypt’s patron goddess, Aphrodite was an important goddess to the city of Tarsus, whose religious history told of her union with an eastern god. Imagine the wildness of the scene, when the people of Tarsus beheld their goddess arriving in clouds of perfume. They flocked to the harbor to welcome and adore her. Not a bad entrance. Antony would have been impressed by the opulence and grandeur at Cleopatra’s command, and he would have gotten the message that their union was written in the stars.
    We don’t remember her in Egyptian terms, as a powerful and able monarch, whose people valued and even worshiped her. Instead, we accept the Roman propaganda of her as a depraved seductress, the ruin of great men. This should not surprise us. Rome was her enemy, and it was in Rome’s best interest to vilify her during wartime. If she wasn’t depicted as a beautiful, debauched, hot-blooded enchantress, how could one explain Roman generals joining forces with her?
    Was she depraved? Apparently she did contrive to kill her siblings in order to be queen. Did she have many lovers? She is reported to have taxed some men dearly for spending a single night with her. After lovemaking, she sometimes had a man killed. Because she was a goddess, any lover became a demigod in her arms. Perhaps she felt well