A BOOK OF THE MOMENT.

CLEOPATRA..

The Life and Times of Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt : a Study In the Origin of the Roman Empire. By Arthur Weigall. New and Revised Edition. (Thornton Butterworth. 21s. net.) PLENTY of people educated in the elementary sense have never heard of Mithridates, Timour, Frederick the Great or the Ming Dynasty. There are comparatively few who could not place Cleopatra. Instinctively they recognize that she is one of the great figures in that crimson tapestry which records the tempestuous passage of humanity through the ages. It is no use to say that history is more beholden to love than life, and that Cleopatra's niche there is only due to the fact that she was a super-wanton, and so on. The eternal trifler will not care a rush, and will still mutter that

" Actium lost for Cleopatra's eyes, Outbalances the Caesar's victories."

And yet curiously enough every man will be offering a wrong reason for his true belief. Cleopatra is not one of the great figures of history only because she had a short, well-chiselled nose, an exquisitely mobile face and figure, a voice "far- above singing," and to borrow a phrase from the most eloquent Bishop who ever lived, "eyes that danced like boys at a festival." She was all that, but she was something more. She was the first statesman and ruler who had a clear and conscious policy for uniting the East and West in a way which would not make the European control his darker half as if he were a dependent, and not an equal. It is true that Cleopatra failed, but that does not make her high endeavour less wonderful or less memorable. The conception was great and the method proposed for its accomplishment powerful, subtle and original. If she miscalculated her resources, and falsified her premises in her eagerness to bring out the conclusion she so passionately desired, we must still observe with wonder and admiration the exulting splendour of the way in which Cleopatra ran her race till the final catastrophe. Even in a downfall so utter and so passionate she, in a sense, had her will. Her well-calculated last moves gave her the end she had always intended should Fate prove unkind. Napoleon talked about suicide rather than endure Elba or St. Helena, things he professed to dread more than to walk behind the Car of Triumph ; but he did nothing. Cleopatra's asp selected with scientific precision a year or more before its use made her manner of death as famous as her way of life. Not only did she do nothing mean or common, at the last, but left nothing to chance. She willed everything, and planned everything, and calcu- lated both acts and results like some great industrial. The only difference was that her industry was politics, her prime commercial asset love, and her chief instruments the human emotions and reactions physical and psychological. The world as it watched her at work and saw the wheels of her terrific machine revolving, blushed and trembled.

She only failed because she was a woman and because by a piece of ill-luck there happened to be a young spotty- faced Italian with a bad circulation, a chronic catarrh, quaint domestic habits and a moral sense depraved to its furthest limits, who had the will to power as highly developed as hers and who never got entangled, as she did, in his own machinery. Cleopatra's tragedy was the eternal tragedy of

the woman with the man's head and the man's ambitions but the woman's nature and the woman's methods of attain- ment. Pope drew truly this side of womanhood when he speaks of

"Power all their ends and Beauty all their moans."

Her beauty and her fascination, which was even greater than her beauty—though that was great—were her undoing. Unconsciously she betrayed herself. She thought her control over men greater than it was, or rather the forgot that there entered into herself some of the potion she used to captivate her lovers. She began by loving with the purest of political motives and ended up by being a very natural and enchanting —woman in love No doubt she would have excused herself by saying that Caesar and Antony were two such fascinating men that she could not help it. Alas ! that pathetic plea, one which must touch every man's heart and every woman's,

is of no avail at the Bar of History. It will be ruthlesslr.

struck out by the court as "bad in law." A man politician in her place could have kept the love-affair and the Welt-politik

apart. A woman could not. You cannot make your own body and your own emotions at once the means and the end, the fulcrum and the thing moved. She took to desiring her instruments when the whole of her desire should have been kept for the objects of her ambition—power for herself and freedom for her country in a world-wide empire.

Our Elizabeth realized that she could not keep love under control if she was to evoke it in order to accomplish her designs. So she quenched the fire, or only pretended to as much of it as would be useful on occasion. Probably, too, she saw that the men around her did not love her physi- cally, but were only awed, or filled with admiration for her craft, her intellect and her possession by the genius of sovereignty. It must have cut her to the heart to find that she could not enchant with a glance, with a flush of the cheek, a tremble in the voice, or a pressure of the hand, and that the tremendous influence over men which she undoubtedly obtained and used came from far different sources. No man was ever physically in love with the Imperial Votaress, though she so often sighed for one. Bitterly came to her the bitter know- ledge that she must rule alone, and, like the male, by fear and the dominance of the mind, and not by the delicious and delirious exercise of a woman's bodily enchantments.

That Cleopatra loved to be in love, and was in love, there can be no doubt. She was almost as much fascinated by her wonderful lovers as they were ultimately fascinated by her. Both began to embrace her on strictly business principles, and out of their " devotion to public duty," and both ended by being deeply touches. Caesar, though it sounds so improbable, was really as proud of the little Caesarion as Napoleon of the little Waleski—" my very own." Antony was soon

quite infatuated and could never again get Egypt out of his head :—

" The laughing Queen, who caught the world's great hands" is no poetic delusion. She was not only the laughing Queen, but the Queen who loved joy and laughter for their own sake, and did not merely keep them as medicine for men "to be used when required, or as the politician may direct." She was all for Love's Pantomime—feasting and drinking, singing and Arabian Night adventures, the risks and riots of high- living. She was the prime scholar of the heart. -

No woman, beautiful beyond the dreams of Eros, rich beyond the dreams of avarice, with boundless health and strength,

and in the full flush of young womanhood ever enjoyed herself as did Cleopatra. Her two years' honeymoon with Antony in Alexandria must have been entered on Aphrodite's Register as a record. Her wooing of the great soldier at the Cydnus could not have been more magnificently mounted. They would fail to overmatch its splendours even at Los Angeles. She was the happiest woman of her age when she and hei luxurious spouse painted Alexandria red after a carouse in which the Queen well held her own, or when her vast barge swam superb with rhythmic oarage up the Nile, or lay moored in hearing of the cataracts and in sight of the temples of Philae. Not only did time not wither her, nor her enchant- ments cloy on others ; but she seems to have been quite free of the deep melancholy which haunts the European heart. The sense of tears for mortal things was not for her. Her eyes would not have been wet in looking at the happy autumn fields. She could not even have wept like Caesar to think that he could never reach' Alexander's record of conquests, and that it was too late to be ambitious.

Again, Cleopatra was no Messalina, no crotomaniac ; not even a Catherine of Russia. It is quite possible, nay even probable, that she gave herself only to Julius Caesar and Mark Antony. It is true, no doubt, that she Qould have added Octavius to the very short list of conquests if he had been willing, but that politic man was quite cold in her presence and was evidently thinking only of how best to fit her and her children by Antony into "the world's greatest triumph." She saw the thought go through his mind :—

" Just behind my car, white robe, diamond tiara, hands tied behind back, with golden girdle,- Soudanese slaves holding children's hands on each side but a little behind. Caesaricn he would have looked well following, but he will probably be dead before that. Besides, he is my half-brother. Anyway, the general effect will be superb. I must have Cleopatra there. Poor

thing, she will be the Star turn without any creation and I shall not be unnecessarily ungrateful."

Cleopatra saw such things behind that polite but slightly embarrassed smile when he paid his respects at the Monument. Without hesitation she sent a slave out for the asp. She saw the days of fascination were over while this young man was the world's centre. True to the way she had always sworn, she acted at once and without debate.

All this is no dream of history, no fiction of the classics, no guessing the nature and figure of a prehistoric creature from a footprint. We know a very great deal about Cleopatra, and we know it from several angles, and of these all are authentic and many of them contemporary. The main source is, of course, Plutarch. His story of the Queen of Egypt is short, but not a word is wasted, and it can be expanded and developed without loss of truth like a pith Japanese flower in a glass of water. Besides he had and used the diary of Cleopatra's body physician—a learned Greek who attended her to the end :— • "You and I would rather see that Diary, would we not, than read a fresh Philippic ? "

• It is a curious fact that the contemporary mentions of Cleopatra are vivid in a very special degree. The allusions to her in Cicero's letters and speeches are very short, but vibrant with life. Needless to say that so devastatingly respectable a person as Cicero was almost in convulsions when he mentioned her. The lady in question was not only the mistress of his arch enemy, Caesar, but was a formidable political intriguer "of the other party." Worst of all she was a Queen. Cicero had a " phobia " for crowned heads almost like that of a Senator from the Middle West. "A Royal Hussy" and on the wrong side in politics ! It was almost more than a much 'respected man and a jurist could bear. There was no sort of restraint or concealment about the Imperator's relations with the Egyptian adventuress. There was a baby` and half-a-dozen nurses flaunting it in Caesar's transpontine villa. "0 Tempura! 0 Mores !" to anticipate a quotation. Cicero's first comment is a well- restrained explosion : "How I hate Cleopatra" ("Reginam Odi"). In the next he tells his correspondent with hot indig- nation how the Queen's pert Chamberlain had talked to him, and how he didn't intend to submit to such treatment from flunkeys, etc.

All that can be rightly used to expand Plutarch is used not merely with discretion but with a priceless instinct for making history interesting by Mr. Weigall in the book before me. It is called a second edition of a work published in 1914, but in reality it is a new book, and deserves and should receive the treatment reserved for new books. It is a vivid piece of history, and yet is compiled in the true scientific spirit. I heartily advise all who know and love Cleopatra's st lry to re-read it in Mr. Weigall's pages. They will be delighted and will learn much. Even greater will be the joy of the unlearned but intelligent. They will find that they need not always see the Greeks and Romans in a glass darkly, but instead as vividly as in a cinema. Mr." Weigall explores every path, and follows every allusion to its source, and expounds the true meaning of every difficult comment. But he does more than that. The background of his picture h the Roman world of the period between Pharsalias and Actium—a world filled with mighty figures. These are painted with a minute brush, and we thus have carefully studied portraits of such men as Caesar, Cicero and Octavian, as well as of Antony and Cleopatra. The book contains also a fascinating account of Alexandria—a purely Greek city which had little or nothing to do with its Nilotic hinter- land, but lived only for the commerce and culture of the Mediterranean.

When readers have finished Mr. Weigall's book, let them read Froude's Caesar and Cicero's letters, and above all Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra. There is something uncanny in the way in which Shakespeare grasped the Queen's politics and understood her nature. He saw what she was aiming at and why she could never attain it. He also exactly saw what Octavian was after. Hence his play must always be one of the best interpreters of the tragedy. Once more many thanks to Mr. Weigall for a delightful book.

J. Sr. LOE STRACHEY.