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...
I had no ear for music but loved the theater and was a great actor so long as I wasn't required to sing. What I really loved was drawing, and even at eight was so passionate for theater that I drew elaborate stage sets and recited Antigone's monologue for the manager of the Royal Alexandrine Theater. I knew I was a good actress, but actors at court would train for eighteen years, and there was the company manager telling my father, the Pharaoh, that I displayed a once-in-a-generation actor's talent. I have no idea if it was an artist's eye or an actor's lie, but I cannot possibly have been that good an actress, could I?
Irregardless, the company affected such faith that I acted in a production of Euripides for my father's pleasure. It was onstage that General Pompey first saw me.
The play was The Bacchae. Queen Agave was played by a man, but in the throne room of my father, I was allowed to play Pentheus, the king torn to pieces by women.
Pompey was in Egypt to extract protection money from the Pharaoh, to maintain the ruse that he was being paid to protect Egypt from enemies when, in fact, Rome was the enemy the Pharaoh was paying not to attack him. My father, Ptolemy XII, had been made extraordinarily rich by the investments of his court minister, Enoch-bar-Joseph, but our Egypt has suffered dysfunction for a thousand years, we had neither army nor arms to fight Rome. My father, next to General Crassus the richest man in the world, offered Pompey literally half Egypt's fortune to refrain from attack, but after seeing The Bacchae, Pompey refused the offer. He had seen me onstage and what he really wanted was a weekend in my company.... I was 9.
My older sister killed herself a year later, and to spare my father shame at court, it was announced that Egypt's next sovereign died of a chill. I was thereupon forced to be wife to my older brother at 10. While my brother-husband was slow-witted, I'd always displayed all manner of scholastic aptitude. It was decided that while my brother-husband, the crown prince, went off every day to sport and whore, I would be the true Pharaoh in all but name, and ferried down the Nile every day to be educated amid the Library of Alexandria and its 500,000 scrolls. To this day, library and its glories are the truest husband I've ever had.
For six years I studied seventeen hours every day. Any assignment incomplete in the allotted time would result in a beating. I learned the full measure of grammar, logic. rhetoric, arithmetic, music, astronomy, and geometry. I grew up speaking Greek at court and by my servants attained fluency in Coptic from first speech. I was fluent in Latin by elevent, Nubian by twelve, Aramaic by thirteen, Numidian by fourteen, and Hebrew by sixteen. I was compelled to memorize whole volumes of Homer - Odyssey 9-12, and the entire last third of the Iliad. I must have read three hundred critical commentaries on them end to end.
And along with all this useless literary merit, I learned all of the mythology of our pagan world, both the Grecian and Egyptian. My tutor instructed me: "Think of the Gods not as beings apart from us but your ancestors and friends whose daily company you keep. They are your only true peers who may understand the divine burdens of thronely life."
My tutor, Philostratus, was a eunuch. Yet when I was sixteen he cornered me in a library stack: "My crownest princess, it is expected that boys have affairs with their tutors, why not girls? No education is truly complete without sex." I was married already for six years, deflowered for seven, and a mother at twelve years old. Never had I known happiness either connubial or conjugal. What other option had I more attractive? He had already been a far more a husband to me than my brother. "But 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 for those seventeen hours a day. 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, I will not deny that the sensations he imparted made me hungrily curious, and he told me to picture in his stead any man I liked 'as all good wives do.' He was, as always, the most thorough tutor; knowledgeable and authoritative. He taught from a rare Indian textbook and approached every act as a further lesson in Archemedean mechanics and Euclidean geometry.
It was not until eighteen when Philostartus was caught in flagrante delicto with me. My brother, for my tutor's lustful presumption, impaled Philostratus upon a spike from his anus to his mouth. In the fight that followed between me and my husband, I came at him with a knife, opened his vein, and he developed a gangrenous infection that spread around his body for nine months. Across the palace I could hear him scream, and it gave me more pleasure than a night with him ever could.
Ancient custom required me to marry to marry my second brother, then ten years old himself, but I refused custom, and my refusal launched a civil war because many Egyptians at court considered my refusal the worst kind of dishonor. Those in opposition to me said that I would never have demanded this had Egyptian women not been so spoiled by equality and education.
(this needs elaboration)
Before I mounted the Pharaohship as sole ruler, my brother's friends at court never ceased in their toxic comments that 'our new Pharaoh looks like a witch', even as I walked by them. It was at this moment I realized that as a woman in a man's world, I had to cultivate that which women have, and as I had innately less than other women, I had to make more of less.
It was Caesar who arrived when I was 20, and brokered the peace between my brother and me. Caesar, having heard of all Pompey's exploits, guessed from my refusal to marry the one thing that would give me more pleasure than any other: and in an immediate private audience he requested after disembarking from his ship, he presented me with the most splendid gift; beneath the present an engraved silver platter from Brittania, above the present an immaculately preserved Egyptian embroidery from the 18th dynasty. The gift was Pompey's head.
Caesar looked like a phallus. He was 51, tall and so thin he could walk through a lyre; completely bald on top with half his ring of hair combed forward in a manner more absurd than the British stone henges he would describe. Yet legends of his female conquests were so manifold that I doubted a homely, witchy girl like me would merit romantic affection. Yet I immediately felt the heave of his eros; not from the loins but from the heart, and within fifteen seconds I understood why women far more beautiful than I thought him tantalizing.
The appeal was that Caesar was every woman's dream of a husband. What enticed us was that amid his company, he made us his absolute equals. He had no fear to cry or panic in front of women, no reservation for bequeathing all those sexual services men of high station considered degrading, and most importantly, he listened to women as a complete conversational partner. He considered our insights, and while never hesitating to refute them did so with such nuance that we understood he apprehended every word of which we said. Upon men he imposed his authority's full might, with women he shared the full burdens of his vulnerability.
The wisdom of women was Caesar's greatest weapon, his greatest resource, his greatest teacher. We watched powerlessly as man after man fell to Caesar's defeat. Caesar would enter land after land the conquerer, take the wife of the fallen king into confidence, and she would divulge every secret of what made her husband a bad king.
With Caesar, women did not seduce and he did not seduce them, he simply knew that his ability to converse and listen as a peer would be rewarded. In his company, we women learned what he would tell no man. He'd inevitably explain he thought ambition the worst of all burdens; one he pursued as joyless compulsion. Even as he chased the unsat throne atop the Roman world, he knew he simultaneously chased death and martyrdom. To Caesar, empire and imperial rule were the only ways to keep Rome from dying the horrible collapse of all empires. To save Rome, so said Caesar, he had to destroy it. He truly loved Rome but he believed it declining to barbaric demise. If he put his name into glory and history amid the process, it was simply his reward of gratitude he felt himself owed, like a doctor to a patient he saves. Yet in retrospect, he played women like a pan pipe. None of it was true. Was he ever truly attracted to me, or was I allure to him simply because of my descent from the true love of Caesar's life: Alexander the Great?
Caesar had been to every eastern court and saw the gorgeous ways kings lived; the art, the jewels, the fashionable finery, and coveted it as only could a man formed by Rome's censure of luxury.
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