THE REAL CLEOPATRA.

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXVI, Issue 4796, 7 January 1925, Page 3

THE REAL CLEOPATRA.

A GREAT FIG IHE OF HER TIME. WEIGHING HER ACTIONS. What manner of woman was the real Cleopatra ? She has come down to us obscured by a smoke-screen of Roman malice, and poets and novelists have combined to present her as a passionate Oriental voluptuary, addicted to many abnormal crimes to further her tortuous ambitions and satisfy her •pleasures. The genius of Shakespeare has set the seal upon these popular traditions, and legend is always so much more tenacious than cold historical fact that it is doubtful if such special pleading as Mr Aithur Weigall attempts in his “Life and Times oil Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt,” of which a new and revised edition has just been issued, will disturb the delusions of nearly 2000 years, states an exchange.

The pity of it is that the true Cleopatra, as far as she can be rescued from the cloud of slander and fiction, is so much more attractive than the Egyptian syren of popular conception. Mr Weigall, perhaps, goes .too far in insisting upon the purity of her Greek descent; one does not even know who her mother was. But it may be accepted that, like all the Ptolemies, she was mainly Greek in blood, culture, and disposition. She spoke Greek, dressed as a Greek, and ruled in a Greek city. She knew little of the land oC the Pharaohs, and was as little influenced by it as, say, the people of Athens.

She was, probably, not beautiful in the strict sense of the term, although authentic representatoing of her are too meagre to form any judgment bn this point. Still, enough may be accepted to form some idea of the type of woman she was. The heads on a few coins and an indifferent bust in the British Museum portray her as of pronounced aquiline features, delicately moulded, and'suggesting refinement rather than excessive passions. That she was of small, slight physique may be gathered from the manner of her sensational introduction to Julius CaeshL The incident is worth retelling as characteristic of her indom.itable courage and resource. A palace intrigue had driven her into exile, and she had returned with a scratch army to contest her sovereign rights just at the time that the elderly dictator of the Roman world had landed at Alexandria and taken possession of the Royal Palace. Determined to put her case before him in the palace, Cleopatra came in a boat to the tsteps at night, with a single attendant, who was cominanded to tie her up in a blanket and cany her as a bundle on his shoulder through the danger zone. In this way the dishevelled little queen was brought into the precense of the astonished Caesar.

How much the subsequent intimacy was de to mutual attachment and how much to political expediency may be left to individual opinion to decide. The jaded appetite of the dissolute Caesar was no doubt stimulated by the charm and youth of Cleopatra, the novelty of the situation, and the exalted position of his new conquest, but that her chief attarction in his eyes was as a pawn in his boundless schemes of universal autocracy is more likely.

On net- side, it is more difficult to believe that she can have felt. any overmastering passion for a lover who had aged beyond his yeans, and was old enough to be her grandsire. Still, Caesar was a great dandy, and had immense personal fascination when he chose to exercise it, and, of course, an incomparable prestige. There is evidence enough that she admired all these qualities, and was proud of the alliance, but that she also regarded him as the one salvation uf her tottering throne is beyond dispute.

Did the brawn and bonhomie of Marc Antony appeal more strongly to her ? Mr Weigall thinks that she was “attracted by his herculean strength and brave appearance,” and she. was very lonely, but considerations of high politics were no less strong in his case. She appears to have become disgusted with his drunken habits and vacillation of purpose. His desertion of her and marriage to Octavia rankled deeply. Nevertheless, their relations approximated much more closely to a love union than did her connection withs Caesar. And there was a domestic propriety about the palace menage that destroys the legend of unbridled licentiousness. Her three children by Antony, her son and chief hope-by Julius, and Antony’s son by Fulvia, form a happy family circle. Moreover, in the eyes of all her Egyptian subjects Cleopatra was legally the wife of both Caesar and Antony, and they were raised to the rank of divinities by their union with the reigning representative of the sungod. In the case of Julius there is ground for believing,that a form of marriage was contracted.

That there was a very frivolous side to Cleopatra’s nature is illustrated into the boisterous humour and love of tomfoolery which characterised by the zest with which she entered Mark Antony. Says Mr Weigall : "Sometimes, in the darkness of the night, she would dress herself in the clothes of a peasant woman, and disguising Antony in the garments of a slave, she would lead him througn the streets of the city in search of adventure. They would knock ominously at the doors or windows of unknown houses and disappear like ghosts when they Were opened.’” Occasionally,' of course, they were caught by the doorkeepers or servants and, as Plutarch says, "were very scurvily answered and sometimes even beaten severely, though most people guessed who they were.” At another tinie she would send a diver to the bottom of the lake to tie a fish to the hook of Antony’s rod.

Altogether, Cleopatra was a great figure in the history of her time, and the more one knows of the real woman and the facts of her life the more disposed one is to decide that she was more sinned against than sinning,