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Nina, I hadn't heard that archaeologists may be on the verge of discovering Cleopatra's tomb until I read your post this morning. By coincidence, last night I was reading a chapter about Cleopatra in Christina Nehring's forthcoming book A Vindication of Love: Reclaiming Romance for the Twenty-First Century. Nehring's contrarian argument complements Schiff's essay nicely. She argues that in domesticating love into egalitarian marriages, by emphasizing equality and intimacy rather than power-differentials and erotic distance, we've lost that special sizzle. Shakespeare's Cleopatra and Antony constitute one of her prime examples of a love match that really works, a love match filled with games and drama:
Convinced that docility in the life of the affections is the road to dreariness, Cleopatra offers Antony a smorgasbord of strategic contradictions. When Antony wishes to ignore a messenger, she orders him to pay attention; when he wishes to lounge in her arms, she reports herself missing; when he desires to go to sea-battle against his enemy Octavius Caesar, she accompanies him, only to flee at the worst moment possible, prompting him to withdraw his ships after her own, and humiliating him before the military world.
As he acknowledges to her after, "My heart was to thy rudder tied by th' strings,/ and thou should'st tow me after. O'er my spirit/Thy full supremacy thou knew'st."
It's The Rules, the Nile Edition. Except that somehow in Cleopatra's case, the game-playing does seem like a form of strength rather than passivity scripted to look like authority. As you point out, Nina, we see Cleopatra as powerful, sexual, and forward. I can't think of all that many contemporary cultural figures who share her traits. I'm curious: Do you, like Nehring, think that her capriciousness is a crucial part of her appeal?
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A team of archaeologists believe that they're on the verge of uncovering Cleopatra's tomb—a discovery that could potentially drive the whole world pyramid-mad, the way King Tut did back in the '20s and then again in the '70s.
Stacy Schiff has a fantastic essay in the New York Times
about the legend of Cleopatra—who, Shiff points out, was not just the
lover of two of the most powerful men of her time but a fearsome
monarch in her own right, a woman whose "antecedents were the
rancorous, meddlesome Macedonian queens who
routinely poisoned brothers and sent armies against sons...These
women were raised to rule."
And yet, as we all know, Cleopatra's legacy has little to do with her political prowess:
Cleopatra has gone down in history as a wanton seductress. She is the original bad girl, the
Monica Lewinsky of the ancient world. And all because she turns up at
one of the most dangerous intersections in history, that of women and
power.
She presides eternally over the chasm between
promiscuity and virility, the forest of connotations that separate
“adventuress” from “adventurer.” Women schemed while men strategized in
the ancient world, too.
So
is a double standard simply inevitable when it comes to female leaders?
Cleo herself is mum on the topic. As Schiff notes, "No matter what the
tombs of Taposiris yield, they are unlikely to offer
up an answer to the vexed question of women and power." (Though in Shakespeare's version,
our queen has some choice words on the subject, perceptively declaring
that future dramatists would chalk up Antony's indiscretions to
drunkenness, while she herself would have to suffer seeing "some
squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness / I' the posture of a whore.")
But according to the BBC, the dig may solve another eternally vexing question:
Zahi Hawass, Egypt's chief archaeologist, said the coins found at the
temple refuted "what some scholars have said about Cleopatra being very
ugly".
"The finds from Taposiris reflect a charm... and indicate that Cleopatra was in no way unattractive," he said.
Well, thank Amun-Ra for that.
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