THE STORY OF A QUEEN CLEOPATRA THE STORY OF A QUEEN l Exceptionalpeopleexistbeyond theconfinesofirlOTJJlty; in the final analysis their impact is that of a physical cause, offireorwater. -GOETHE TRANSLATED BY BERNARD MIALL GARDEN CITY PUBLISHING CO., INC. NEW YORK CL '939 GardenCityPublishingCo.,Inc. Cleopatra: Geschichtc einer Konigin Copyright 1937 by Querido Verlag N. V. Amsterdam Cleopatra: The Story of a Queen Copyright 1937 by theViking Press, Inc., New York Printed in U. S. A. Distributedin Canada, by theMacmillan Company of Canada, Ltd. ace C/re/a -T-IHE last time I met her was on the Nile; yet her mind was 1 fixed upon the North; to her, Egypt was almost a foreign country. Herhomewas theMediterranean, and the sea-breeze sighs through her story. Of all the biographies that I have written, this is distin- guished by an all but total absence of quotations. The per- sonal documents letters, speeches, memoirs which I have accumulated in other cases in order to elucidate the charac- ter ofmysubject byhis own words, or those ofhis friends and foes, are here completely lacking. Such documents as thelove- letters of Cleopatra, and most of the private papers ofAntony and Caesar, arelost to us; theresurvive only three sentences of a single letter of Antony's. But the public life of the queen, apart from one brief unknown period, has been reliably re- corded for posterity, though only because the three Romans with whose lives her own was intertwined have their places in the of the world. history Yet such characteristics of hers as are recorded by the half- dozen authors of antiquity who wrote in the years following closely upon her reign present us with a living portrait, and this is confirmed by at least one authentic bust. Plutarch, my Preface master, above all, I am able to follow closely, and for the first time; for although by virtue of my race, my life, and my edu- cation I belong to the Mediterranean, I have hitherto de- scribed Greek characters only as dramatis personae, never his- torically. In view of the naively subtle records of the-ancients all the modern historians have seemed to me superfluous; but I have read and profited by Ferrero's great history of Rome, and also Stahr's and WeigalFs fine studies of Cleopatra (1864 and 1927) . For even if Plutarch were not more modern than all the analyticalwriters ofourtime, hewould stillbe closer tohis subjects; and when he writes that his grandfather learned the secret of his roast meats from Antony's head cook in Alexan- dria, this statementhas for me more actuality than any discus- sion between two scholars of today, of whom one accuses the other of giving too much credit to Suetonius and too little to Appian. The absence of psychological documents leaves me free to dwell more insistently on states of mind and soliloquies than would have been had my sources been more abun- possible dant. When in 1919, with my Goethe, I began to write a new kind ofbiography, I permitted myself an occasional soliloquy, and also in myNapoleon, but I did not follow this practice in my later books. Here, however, in the complete absence of psychological sources, the monologue was compulsory. For the action there is everywhere sufficient warrant, but even Plutarch could only deduce the actors' feelings. Yet no battle of those days, no clash of parties, no Roman province has any significance for us; only the feelings are eternal, they are of thesamenatureas ourown, andonlybytheirlightarewe able [6]