Hell Hath No Fury by Rosalind Miles Read Free Book Online Page A

Ptolemy XIV, as co-regent. Cleopatra bore Caesar a son, dubbed Caesarion, who in 47 BCE accompanied his mother to Rome, where she lived in one of Caesar’s villas. After Caesar’s assassination in 44 BCE , she returned to Egypt, where in all probability she was responsible for the death by poisoning of Ptolemy XIV. With another brother successfully dispatched, she resumed her position as co-sovereign with her son Caesarion (Ptolemy XV).
    Two years after Caesar’s death, Cleopatra was summoned to a meeting in Tarsus to confirm her loyalty. Her inquisitor was Marcus Antonius (Shakespeare’s Mark Antony), another triumvir. Through Cleopatra’s Eastern techniques of seduction, Antony was expertly reeled in and persuaded to live with her in sybaritic idleness in Alexandria. There she bore him three children and, according to the Roman historian and gossip Suetonius, married him in an Egyptian rite, despite the fact that he was already married to the sister of one of his fellow triumvirs.
    As Anthony’s credit ran out in Rome, where he was believed to have lost his Roman integrity and sunk into Eastern excess, Cleopatra financed his disastrous campaign against the Parthians, in which he lost the greater part of his army. This did not prevent Antony and Cleopatra from celebrating with a triumph (a formal victory parade) in Alexandria, where she and her children were declared rightful rulers of both the Roman and Egyptian Empires. Mark Antony now planned to found a new imperial dynasty whose power base was to be Alexandria rather than Rome. Cleopatra would be Isis to Antony’s Osiris, a notion that did not endear him to his enemies in Rome.
    In 32 BCE the Senate was persuaded to declare war on Cleopatra—in effect a move against Antony, who would not desert her. The Roman poet Horace gloated that Cleopatra would be dispatched “as swiftly as the hawk follows the feeble dove.” The conflict was decided by the Battle of Actium, fought at sea off the west coast of Greece while land-based hosts looked on. Of the four hundred warships under Antony’s command, Cleopatra had provided two hundred.
    Caesar’s great-nephew and adopted son and heir, Octavian, another triumvir, prudently delegated operational command of the Roman fleet to his competent lieutenant Vipsanius Agrippa. Mark Antony was able to break through Agrippa’s battle line but lost the day and fled to Egypt with Cleopatra, who had been present at the battle to inspire her own fighting men.
    As Octavian’s armies closed on Alexandria, they both committed suicide. The ancient sources assert that Cleopatra killed herself with two asps that she applied to her arm, although it is possible that she ended her life with a poisoned hairpin. Her son Caesarion was captured shortly afterward and put to death. Thus ended the line of the Hellenistic rulers of Egypt, and with it the line of the pharaohs. Cleopatra’s children by Mark Antony were spared, reared in Rome by his wife Octavia.
    As Caesar Augustus, Octavian remodeled the constitution and carried Rome into a new age. Cleopatra was demonized by Horace as “the wild queen” who had plotted the ruin of the Roman Empire. In spite of the destruction of all her plans, Cleopatra nevertheless became a legend, reworked in countless paintings, poems, plays, and, since 1908, movies. She lives again as the baleful silent diva Theda Bara’s kohl-stained temptress of 1917; as Claudette Colbert’s Art Deco sex kitten in 1934; and in the well-upholstered Elizabeth Taylor, dripping with diamonds and diaphanous nightwear, as she conspicuously consumes Richard Burton’s Mark Antony in the 1963
Cleopatra.
    Reference: Lucy Hughes-Hallett,
Cleopatra,
1990.
    TOMOE GOZEN
    Japanese Samurai, b. ca. 1161, d. ca. 1184
    An example of the consummate woman warrior, Tomoe Gozen was a legendary fighter at the time of the Genpei War (1180–85), a period that saw the birth of the