Cleopatra: A Sphinx Revisited

6. The Amazing Afterlife of Cleopatra’s Love Potions

132 The death of Elizabeth I of England in 1603 may help to explain northern Europe’s sudden resurgence of interest, in the early seventeenth century, in a very different queen, Cleopatra of Egypt.1 In London, for example, Samuel Daniel “newly altered” his tragedy Cleopatra for performance and republication in 1607; William Shakespeare followed with his own Antony and Cleopatra, first performed in 1608.2 Meanwhile, German scholars reported the discovery of an old manuscript containing the texts of Letters on the Infamous Libido of Cleopatra the Queen, exchanged among three people: Marc Antony, the famous physician Quintus Soranus of Ephesus, and the monarch herself. This correspondence was first published in Frankfurt, just before the fall book fair of 1606, a fitting scholarly prelude to the salacious scripts that would soon be sweeping the stages of London.3 Taken together, the two new plays and the ancient letters presented a picture of Egypt’s last sovereign that diverged as drastically from the image of England’s recently deceased Virgin Queen as the goddess of love ever differed from chaste Diana. THERAPEUTIC SEXUAL ADVICE FOR CLEOPATRA AND MARC ANTONY? Shakespeare eloquently described Cleopatra’s charms (Antony and Cleopatra 2.2.): Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale Her infinite variety. Other women cloy The appetites they feed, but she makes hungry 6 The Amazing Afterlife of Cleopatra’s Love Potions Ingrid D. Rowland I wish you all joy of the worm. William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, Act 5, Scene 2 The Amazing Afterlife of Cleopatra’s Love Potions 133 Where most she satisfied; for vilest things Become themselves in her . . . If Shakespeare conveyed the queen’s powers of seduction by dramatic suggestion , the Letters revealed them outright. They revealed Cleopatra as a woman of insatiable physical appetites, as well as a sovereign of such overpowering natural authority that she could reduce Rome’s toughest soldiers—all but Augustus—to abject thralldom. Marc Antony’s first letter to Quintus Soranus has the tough Roman general shifting responsibility in mid-sentence (through an egregious dangling participle) from his own adulterous impulses to the Alexandrian queen’s aggressive allure:4 Smitten by love of Cleopatra and delighting in her extraordinary beauty, softened by her caresses beyond what becomes a manly spirit, I so relaxed the marital bond [he was still married to Fulvia Flacca Bambula] that, disdaining both myself and fear of the law, she stained herself with me in adultery; and in no mean wise, rather, subordinating her womanly modesty to desire, she broke into such impatience for crime that in a single night, after donning a hood, she accepted, in a brothel as a prostitute, the embraces of one hundred and six men.5 His letter continues by supplying explicit clinical details about Cleopatra’s physical state—just what an ancient Roman physician might want to know when giving advice by correspondence from one side of the Mediterranean to the other. Soranus replied with an equally graphic prescription after this tantalizing preface:6 When I was undergoing instruction in the Temple of Venus on the island of Chios, I discovered a book that contained the recipe and applications of this reliable ointment, which I send to you. . . . The power of this ointment is such that by it any woman will be so attracted to the man with whom she lies that she will forget every other love. After a preliminary rub of milk of wild fig and root of spurge-laurel, Antony was advised to apply the secret ointment, whose additional virtues, especially when combined with the eating of “hot” foods like pepper, eggs, cheese, and strong wine, included a capacity to expand any man’s “extension” to ten Roman inches, “which if you do not have by nature, you should have by medicine.”7 Cleopatra’s response to the special Grecian formula was spectacular and immediate , as she wrote to Soranus with glowing gratitude:8 To the many thanks I owe the greatness of your good will, my conscience bears witness, which manifestly perceives the great danger and great infamy from which I have been freed by your wisdom. And Antony testifies as well, whom, thanks to your intervention, I now cherish exclusively. Soranus, in his reply, furnished the queen with a disquisition on female anatomy (including identification of the ovaries as “testiculi”) as well as a series of 134 The Amazing Afterlife of Cleopatra’s Love Potions...