CLEOPATRA.
WHO was Cleopatra's grandmother? That seems rather a ludicrous question when put so baldly ; but upon the answer to it depends not only an ethnological question of some interest, but the accuracy of the conception which European poets, dramatists, writers of fiction, sculptors, and painters have formed of Cleopatra's personality. They have almost invariably represented her as a half-caste, a woman in whom the charm of Europe and the charm of Asia were united, who conquered the masters of the world as Aspasia conquered Pericles,—that is, with the intellect of a thinker directing the arts of an odalisque. It is quite possible or pro- bable that Cleopatra's attraction lay in a subtle union of those two sets of qualities; but the qualities, we think, did not spring from any admixture of races. It is as nearly certain as any- thing can be that is not absolutely proved, that the daughter of Ptolemy Auletes was of the purest Hellenic strain. She was the last of a strange House, one unique in many points of its history among dynasties, the descendants of Ptolemy Lagos, himself a bastard son of Philip of Macedon, and therefore half-brother, and trusted friend and General, of Alexander. They were by far the most successful of all the dynasties which sprang from the camp of the great conqueror, who, had he lived, would have changed the relation of Europe to Asia ; and they were successful mainly because they never " Medised," never accepted Asia fully, but ruled as chiefs of a dominant caste, superior to its subjects in race, in intelligence, and in the closeness of its relation to the European world. The Ptolemies, as we call them, or Lagidm, as they called themselves, kept their Greeks, so far as they could, as separate as the English are in India, and maintained for twelve generations a tone which was distinctively European, placing as it did the pursuit of knowledge almost first among the objects of life. They displayed always the restless curiosity, the hunger for information as to the facts of the world, which Asia, whether semi-Aryan or Mongol, has so con- spicuously lacked. To guard in the fullest completeness the purity of their blood, they adopted a monstrous "family law" abhorrent to their own countrymen and co-religionists, and generation after generation chose their own whole-blooded sisters as their Queens, the custom growing at last, as it did among the Incas of Peru, into a superstition. The sister was acknowledged to have a right to be the first Queen. Such inter- marriage produced, of course, its natural result, the intensifi- cation of all qualities, and every Ptolemy is like the last, only more so, a soldier, a Prince greedy of empire, a thinker con- scious that his duty was to "promote" learning, art, and the spread of positive knowledge, more especially in what we should now call the "physical" direction, and a states- man utterly without mercy, or scruple, or hesitation in ordering crime. The bad side to them culminated in Ptolemy Physcon, Ptolemy of the mighty Paunch, a blood- thirsty bree to whom, nevertheless, his latest biographer is " ashamed " but compelled to allow the genius of his House for promoting learning and inquiry. If Cleo- patra had been entirely of this House, there would not have been a doubt of the purity of her race ; but in her pedigree there is a break. Constant intermarriage produced sterility at last, and Ptolemy Latbyrus, son of Ptolemy Physcon, had no legitimate heir. He had however, two illegitimate but acknowledged sons, and as the Greeks of Egypt could not think of allowing the Lagidm to die out, they chose the eldest, Ptolemy Auletes, to be the Sovereign of Egypt. Was his mother a Greek? It is absolutely uncertain, but the probabilities are a hundred to one that she was,—first, because the King would not in face of the deep caste feeling of the dominant race, have acknowledged a son by a barbarian ; secondly, because the many enemies of "the Fluteplayer " taunted him only with illegitimacy, and not with barbarian blood; and thirdly, because his daughter, in whom the race flowered and expired, was so intensely a Greek and a Ptolemy, utterly unscrupulous, with that Greek love of Oriental luxury which was betrayed by the earliest Greek heroes, and yet with a fiery intelligence, a positive thirst for knowledge, and a brain which seemed to the dialler-witted Roman patricians that of a witch from whom no man could be safe. That Cleopatra was three-fourths Greek by blood, is certain, as that she was wholly Greek, or rather Macedonian, in training and ideas; and the almost
overwhelming probability is that she was wholly Greek in origin, as also she was in creed. It was Aphrodite, not Isis, who was her goddess when she sailed down the Cydnus ; and if Sarah Bernhardt represents her, as the critics say she does, as an Asiatic, she, we believe, misconceives her personality altogether.
What was her inner character? A voluptuous woman of the East, say the Romans, eager to enchain any master of a Roman army by the foulest arts ; but the Roman oligarchy not only hated but dreaded Cleopatra. To them she was not only Asia incarnate, but the representative of that "regal" sway, that rule by volition instead of by traditional order, which, with their statesmanlike instinct, they saw the triumphant stmtocrat whom their system tended to produce, would ulti- mately desire. They cursed her as the greatest of Asiatic harlots, whereas she was a Greek, and much more like Mary Stuart as her enemies have painted her, a woman unscrupulous in gratifying her fancies, careless even of murder when needful—Cleopatra murdered her brother- husband, just as Mary murdered her cousin-husband--but who used her charms chiefly as instruments to attain her ends, which were, first of all, the empire of the East which !her ancestors had striven for generations to acquire—and very nearly acquired—and to defeat the half-civilised and headless Roman power which she hated with the hatred of a monarch, and despised with the contempt of a true Greek. Who were these barbarians that they should conquer men who were polished when they were savages ? She always -selected the same lover, the head of the invading Roman army, and always used him to help her in founding, as she hoped, the empire of the East. Her attractive power was probably not her beauty. Her coins do not reveal a beautiful woman, but a broad-browed, thoughtful Queen; and Plu- tarch, in describing her, evidently speaks on the authority -of men whose fathers had studied her face. He says :— 4' Her actual beauty, it is said, was not in itself so remarkable that none could be compared with her, or that no one could see her without being struck by it, but the contact of her presence, if you lived with her, was irresistible ; the attrac- tion of her person, joining with the charm of her conversa- tion, and the character that attended all she said or did, was something bewitching. It was a pleasure merely to hear the sound of her voice, with which, like an instrument of many strings, she could pass from one language to another ; so that there were few of the barbarian nations that she answered by an interpreter; to most of them she spoke herself, as to the lEthiopians, Troglodytes, Hebrews, Arabians, Syrians, Medes, Parthians, and many others, whose language she had learnt." She had far brighter wits than the Roman ladies, and an im- mensity to give,—a position of luxury as superior to the luxury of Rome at that time as the luxury of Paris is superior to that of Washington, despotic power in a great Kingdom, the greatest treasure then in a single hand, and the command of a fleet unequalled in the Mediterranean. Both Julius Cwsar and Antony used her resources as their own, and we suspect she cared for neither, but only for the sovereignty they might help her to acquire. When Cesar died, she captured Antony, and her desertion of him at Actium was, we would suggest, no exhibition of a cowardice utterly inconsistent with her character and her history, but the result of a cold calculation that if the fleets of Antony and Octavius destroyed each other, she, with her great fleet intact, and unassailable by Rome for years to come, would be supreme and solitary mistress of the East. Her calculation failed. Octavius won, a Roman army which she knew to be irresistible landed in Egypt, and she found its leader utterly indifferent alike to herself and to all that she had to give. Octavius wanted no 4. regal" position, no diadem of the Eastern kind, but to stand in Rome as a simple citizen, yet the real master of the world; and he resolved not only to refuse her offers, but to end her claims and her dynasty together by carrying her to Rome to increase the splendour of his triumph. Cleopatra seems to have heard of this resolve, or at any rate she feared it ; and with her hopes all broken, her throne crumbled, and the last Greek State at the feet of the detested Roman, she resolved to end herself and the great dynasty of the Lagidm together. The Ptolemies understood poisons ; she procured an easy one, possibly—though this, of course, is but a conjectural explanation of that weird and improbable story—in a little vessel shaped like a snake; and so departed, leaving a
name which, like that of every leading figure in the eternal struggle between Asia and Europe, like that of Mil- tiades, and Alexander, and Crassus, and Zenobia, and Charles Martel, and Constantine Palaallogus, has imbedded itself in the imagination of mankind. With her the independence of Asia perished for centuries ; and it is perhaps a half-conscious perception of that fact which has made so many artists in words and stone represent a Greek of the Greeks, who knew everything known in her time, and talked in seven languages, who fascinated Julius Ca33ar and outwitted Antony, as half an Asiatic or an African. She would have regarded that de- scription as the extremity of insult; but a predisposition is hard to correct, and even Shakespeare, though his word " gipsy " probably means only Egyptian, pictured Cleopatra to himself as a swarthy beauty, black with African suns.
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