‘The Cleopatras: The Forgotten Queens of Egypt’
By Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones
Basic Books, 384 pages

“While we yearn for Cleopatra to be the violet-eyed Elizabeth Taylor, shimmering in a variety of low-cut gold-lamé gowns, the historical woman behind the legend was radically different,” Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones discloses. To which we reply, “Aw, shucks,” but we are then offered something more nuanced: “No great beauty, yet a woman of some physical charm, high intellect and spellbinding charisma,” a “consummate politician who put the safety and longevity of her royal house at the forefront of all her policies.”

Actually there were seven Cleopatras, and Elizabeth Taylor portrayed the one who came at the end of the line. Like her predecessors, Cleopatra VII ruled not by fiat but by guile. None of the Cleopatras could say: “Let there be.” They had to make it look like “it had to be,” when their husband-kings or sons in the line of succession, or other mother-rulers, got in the way and had to be murdered or exiled.

Number seven, the most flamboyant and most dynastically minded, paired up with the new imperial power, Rome, had a son by Julius Caesar, named Caesarian. After Caesar was assassinated, she turned to quite a different power broker, Mark Antony. After Antony flamed out, even bungling his suicide and evidently dying in her arms, the unromantic Cleopatra made a futile pass at the new Caesar Augustus, Octavian, in a last, desperate effort to preserve herself and at least a quasi-independent Egypt.

As Mr. Llewellyn-Jones tells it, each Cleopatra seems to have learned from — and sometimes disposed of — the preceding Cleopatra in an unsentimental, power-driven quest that often made their male consorts into dupes or collaborators. “Each Cleopatra was a bespoke creation of her own crafting,” Mr. Llewellyn-Jones argues.

If this is so, why haven’t we heard more about all these Cleopatras? First, the last one was the best at the power game, even if in the end she was a suicide. Second, as Mr. Llewellyn-Jones explains in his Epilogue, male scholars have viewed the Cleopatras with some repugnance for playing the power game, which apparently they regarded as unladylike — even as “uncontrolled viragos.” 

Certainly from a Victorian/Modern sensibility, the Cleopatras who married their brothers and got rid of their children seem even worse than so many Lady Macbeths, but what they thought about what they had to do — which was no more than their male counterparts had done in order to seize or retain the rulership of the Ptolemaic dynasty — is lost to history. 

You could get lost in keeping track of the Cleopatras and their place in Egyptian history, but Mr. Llewellyn-Jones provides a list of the Seleucids and the Cleopatras who intermarried between two dynastic lines, as well as genealogical charts, maps, and a most interesting section on what he calls “Useful Materials.”

“The Cleopatras” concludes with a memorable portrayal of Constantine Cavafy, a lifelong resident of Alexandria, where a good deal of Cleopatrian history occurred. He had the poet’s gift to make us muse about what was missing in the Egyptian inscriptions that touted their rulers and pretended everything was all good, albeit the Cleopatras led lives that rivaled the “very best Verdi operas or the most thrilling Latin American TV soaps.”

Mr. Llewellyn-Jones quotes one of Cavafy’s most haunting poems concerning Caesarian, murdered not long after Octavian triumphed over Mark Antony and Cleopatra had disposed of herself — exactly how is still conjectural, though it might well have been because of that asp. Very little is known about Caesarian and more is the pity, Cavafy implies, as he crafts in “my mind’s eye” a striking boy “capable of deep emotion./ My imagining gave your face a handsome, / dreamlike quality.” 

The switch to “your face” suddenly makes the past palpable. It is as if by hovering over Caesarian the poet hovers over history itself, “still hoping for clemency from those cruel men / who kept whispering ‘too many Caesars.’”

Reading “The Cleopatras” is rather like Mr.  Llewellyn-Jones’s description of Cavafy visiting almost every day the Library of Alexandra in the 1930s, borrowing history books and wondering about what really happened. Mr.  Llewellyn-Jones does what Cavafy aimed to do, “throw some light on a particular period,” and even if he is skeptical about those “inscriptions about the Ptolemies, full of “praise and flattery,” nonetheless the “Cleopatras, / all of them too are awe-inspiring.”

Mr. Rollyson’s work in progress is “Sappho’s Fire: Kindling the Modern World.”