Cleopatra: a life by Stacy Schiff

Author:Stacy Schiff [Stacy Schiff]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biographie, Histoire
ISBN: 9780753539552
Published: 2010-11-15T10:00:00+00:00

SHE TOOK THE long way home, making a kind of triumphal, overland tour of her new possessions. Many were happy to receive her; some of the despots Antony eliminated on her behalf had been nefarious. Around Damascus, for example, Cleopatra now ruled a territory previously controlled by a tribe of predatory, archery-obsessed bandits. With her entourage she wound her way over the rolling hills and rugged cliffs of modern-day Syria and Lebanon, through twisting passes and deep ravines, to wind up on the crest of a mountain chain, between two lofty hills, in Jerusalem. Surrounded by turreted walls and a series of square, thirty-foot towers, Jerusalem was an eminent commercial center, rich in the arts. Cleopatra had business with Herod, who—though an untiring negotiator—could not have been in any great hurry to discuss it.

When last they had met, Herod had been a fugitive and a suppliant. He now sat uneasily on the Judaean throne, king of a people he had had to conquer in order to rule.* Presumably Cleopatra and her retinue stayed with the newly established sovereign, a collector of homes and a man with a Ptolemaic taste for luxury, though his legendarily opulent palace south of the city had yet to be built. Probably Cleopatra was Herod’s guest at his home in the Upper City of Jerusalem, by her definition more of a fortress than a palace. In the course of the visit she met Herod’s fractious extended family, with whom she was about to enter into a subversive correspondence. Herod had the misfortune to share an address with several implacable enemies, first among them his contemptuous, highborn mother-in-law, Alexandra. She represented but one aggravation in Herod’s largely female household. He lived as well with his insinuating mother; a grievance-loving, overly loyal sister; and Mariamme, the cool, exceptionally beautiful wife who had married him as a teenager, and who, to his frustration, somehow could never get past the fact that Herod had murdered half of her family. Though Cleopatra had assisted him three years earlier, though they shared a patron and were together navigating the same roiling Roman waters—each was doing his best to sustain a skittish, peculiar country in the shadow of a rising superpower—he had no need for yet another domineering woman. Unlike the others, this one moreover had designs on his treasury.

For Cleopatra’s visit we have only one source, hostile to his native East, much taken with Rome, working at least partially from Herod’s account. The Jewish historian Josephus obscures but cannot entirely camouflage what transpired: Herod and Cleopatra spent some intensive time in each other’s company, part of it hammering out the details of his obligations. Antony had granted Cleopatra the exclusive right to the Dead Sea bitumen, or asphalt, glutinous lumps of which floated to the surface of the lake. Bitumen was essential to mortar, incense, and insecticide, to embalming and caulking. A reed basket, smeared with asphalt, could hold water. Plastered with it, a boat is waterproof. The concession was a lucrative one.

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