Cleopatra and Antony Read Online Free

the Egyptian outpost at Pelusium and open the way to Alexandria. Archelaus resisted bravely until he was killed but his troops put up little fight.
    Back on his throne, Auletes settled some scores. One of his first acts was to order the slaying of his daughter Berenike for taking his crown. She was probably strangled in the royal palace, possibly before the eyes of her teenage younger sister Cleopatra. Waves of arrests and executions followed, with anyone suspected of complicity with Berenike killed out of hand. Though obviously traumatic, her sister’s death was to Cleopatra’s advantage. As the king’s eldest surviving daughter, under Ptolemaic tradition she was now in line for the throne—a prospect that with two elder sisters might previously have seemed remote.
    Though Antony’s stay in Egypt was brief, some claim that during it he first saw and even fell in love with Cleopatra, then fourteen. The second-century historian Appian later wrote, “It is said that he was always very susceptible . . . and that he had been enamored of her long ago when she was still a girl and he was serving as master of horse under Gabinius at Alexandria.” This may well be an embroidery of the facts. Appian himself acknowledged his taste for the sensational and for writing about those events “which are most calculated to 25 astonish by their extraordinary nature.” But even if Antony did not fall in love with Cleopatra, she must have seen the good-looking young man and heard of his courage at Pelusium. She may also have been struck by his humanity—he successfully interceded with the king for the lives of Egyptians captured at Pelusium and the Alexandrian population would remember him for it when, many years later, he returned to their city as the lover and ally of their queen.
    As Cleopatra grew into young adulthood in the royal palace, experiencing a more settled period in her life than she had yet known, she could resume her disrupted education and develop the intellectual powers that even her later detractors would not deny. She was more fortunate than the majority of Egyptian and Macedonian women, most of whom received no formal education. Cleopatra could also hardly have been in a better place than Alexandria. Her ancestor Ptolemy I had founded the great Library of Alexandria and the adjacent Museon, where scholars from across the “civilized world” could live and study for free. Museon means “shrine of the Muses” and it had rapidly become the main center of Hellenic learning, supplanting even Athens. In the library scholars edited the first texts of Homer, produced commentaries and divided works up into volumes. The length of the latter was regulated by the optimum length of the papyrus roll—the only writing paper.
    The Museon itself was particularly strong in astronomy, mathematics (Euclid worked there) and medicine. Because the Egyptians mummified their dead, they already had a better knowledge of human anatomy than many others. The Greek professors had built on this, probably with the help of condemned criminals supplied by the Ptolemies for vivisection, to understand the nature of the nervous, digestive and vascular systems. They had established that the brain rather than the heart was the seat of intelligence and undertook pioneering surgery including operations to remove bladder stones, cleanse internal abscesses and repair wounds. They had also developed a detailed knowledge of pharmacology and toxicology.
    The young Cleopatra could take her pick of tutors from the Museon to pursue her interests, which seem to have been wide-ranging. The tenth-century Arab historian al-Masudi described her as “a princess well versed in the sciences, disposed to the study of philosophy.” But as well as her studies she had much else to reflect upon. In particular she could observe at close quarters the conflicting pressures on her father. In fact, Auletes had only four more years to live and they were difficult ones. There