Cleopatra letter to her children before her suicide,
- The Pharaohs are Greek for ten generations and as the product of incest, have no Egyptian blood - supposedly... Talking about Cleopatra III/Ptolemy VIII as zenith of family dysfunction. Cleopatra is determined to spare her children the same fate. Cleopatra is a tenth-generation Greek ruler of Egypt, and incestually bred, she is completely un-Egyptian, or so it is said...
Cleopatra had no ear for music but loved the theater and was a great actor so long as she was not required to sing. She was a great visual artist and stage manager, and from the age of eight was directing the royal theater company in Euripides for her father's pleasure. It was at a production of The Bacchae that General Pompey first saw her. Queen Agave was, as always, played by a man, but in the throne room of her father she was allowed to play Pentheus, the king torn to pieces by women. Pompey was at Egyptian court so as to extract protection money from the Pharaoh, with the ruse that he was being paid to protect Egypt from enemies when, in fact, Rome was the enemy. The Pharaoh, next to General Crassus the richest man in the world, offered Pompey literally half Egypt's fortune (this part should be a dialogue scene), Pompey refused the offer and said that what he really wanted was a weekend in Cleopatra's company.... She was 9.
Cleopatra's older sister killed herself a year later, and to spare the family the shame, it was announced that Egypt's next Pharaohness died of a chill. Cleopatra was thereupon forced to be wife to her older brother at 10. Displaying all manner of intellectual ability while her husband/brother was slow-witted, she was educated every day at the Library of Alexandria and its 500,000 scrolls, "my truest husband," with the understanding that she would eventually run the country while her brother went off to sport and whore.
Cleopatra studied seventeen hours every day and her tutor beat her when she did not complete her lessons. She learned the full measure of grammar, logic. rhetoric, arithmetic, music, astronomy, and geometry. She grew up speaking Greek at court but by her servants attained fluency in Coptic from first speech. She was fluent in Latin by eight, Nubian by ten, Aramaic by twelve, Numidian by fourteen, and Hebrew by sixteen. She was compelled to memorize whole volumes of Homer - Odyssey 9-12, and the entire last third of the Iliad. and must have read literally a thousand critical commentaries on them.
And along with her interest in theater she learned all of the mythology of the Greco-pagan world. "We learned of the Gods not as beings apart from us but our ancestors and friends whose daily company we keep. Our only true peers who could understand the divine burdens of a thronely life."
Her first true lover was, in fact, her tutor, who was a eunuch. She was sixteen, already married for six years, deflowered for seven, and a mother at twelve, but she never knew connubial happiness until finding it with her longtime tutor, Philostratus, who at sixteen cornered her in a library stack to proposition her. "What other option was there? He was a far more interested husband to me than my brother." "My dearest Pharaohess, it is expected that boys have affairs with their tutors, why not girls? No education is truly complete without sex." "You're a eunuch, how can you possibly instruct me?" "All the more way I can." My education effectively ended at sixteen when, rather than learn history, we embarked upon adventures which, unburdened by the need for ejaculate or care for pregnancy, engaged sexual congress a day at a time. This ugly, fat, sweaty man, twice and a half my size, finished my education, but had I learned history rather than sex, we might have outfoxed the Roman burden. I was not for a moment attracted to Philostratus, but he was, as always, the most thorough tutor, knowledgeable and authoritative. He approached every act as a further lesson in mechanics and geometry. I was curious about the sensations he imparted, and he told me to picture in his stead any man I liked 'as all good wives do.'"
3. Cleopatra was caught in flagrante delicto with Philostratus, who, for his lustful presumption, was impaled upon a spike from his anus to his mouth. In the fight between her and her husband, she came at him with a knife, opened his vein, and he developed a gangrenous infection that only killed him after spread around his body for nine months. She was required by custom to marry to her second brother, then ten years old himself. She refused, and her refusal launched a civil war because many Egyptians at court considered her refusal the worst kind of dishonor. Those in opposition to her said that she would never have demanded this had Egyptian women not been so spoiled by equality and education.
3. Caesar arrived when she was 20. When Caesar disembarked, having heard of all Pompey's exploited, he guessed from her refusal to marry the one thing that would give her more pleasure than any other: the head of Pompey, which he presented to her upon an embroidered silver platter.
What made Caesar attractive to women? He was 51 with an absurd combover (completely bald on top with half his ring of hair combed forward.) What made him attractive was that he treated women as his complete equals, intellectually, emotionally, and sexually. He was not afraid to cry or panic in front of women, he was not afraid to bequeath all those sexual services other men of high station considered degrading; and most importantly, he listened to them as a complete conversational partner. He considered their points of view, and while he did not hesitate to refute them, always did so with maximum politesse. From Philostratus I learned even moreso that looks were secondary to charisma. Before I ascended the throne, my brothers friends at court never ceased to comment 'the Pharaohess looks like a witch', even as I walked by them. I realized that as a woman in a man's world, I had to cultivate that which women have, and had I less of it innately than other women, I had to make more of less."
Caesar had been to every eastern court and saw gorgeous ways with which kings lived, the art, the jewels, the fashionable finery, and coveted it as only a man could formed by Rome's spartan censure of luxury. Cleopatra was of particular allure to him because of her descent from Alexander the Great, whom Cleopatra joked was 'the true love of Caesar's life.'
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