Cleopatra and Her Loves
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| Cleopatra and Her Loves |
This is Short Version of Cleopatra and Her Loves as short history.
“Cleopatra and Her Loves” by Clement Wood is a 1920s that dramatizes Cleopatra’s affairs with Julius Caesar, Mark Antony, and others, blending sensuality with melodrama. It’s part of Wood’s series of semi‑erotic historical fictions, published by small presses in the interwar period. Reading from chapter 1
Cleopatra was a pure Greek by blood, of a family which accidents of conquest had placed over Egypt. The first of the Ptolemies, or ruling house of which Cleopatra was the last, was Ptolemy, son of Lagos, a Macedonian general of Alexander the Great. At the death of the world-conqueror, Ptolemy seized Egypt; and he and his descendants continued to rule the Nile Empire for two and a half centuries. Alexandria, where the Ptole:nies ruled,. was a Greek colony placed on the seacoast of Egypt, built with Greek buildings, living a Grecian life, and with Greek as its court language. Such pictures as we have of Cleopatra, even ‘when representing the Egyptian goddess Isis, show her clad in the Greek manner.
The Ptolemies were a family of royal murderers. The fourth Ptolemy murdered his father, Ptolemy III, and planned the murders of his brother, his uncle, his mother, and his wife. Ptolemy V murdered all who offended him; the eighth of the name murdered his young nephew, the rightful heir to the throne; married the boy’s mother, Cleopatra II,. and killed his own child by her. He then married his niece, Cleopatra III; and, upon his death, the younger wife murdered the older of the same name. The young queen’s son, Ptolemy:
mother;.when the plot failed, the son murdered his own mother. Ptolemy-XII married and then murdered his stepmother, and was himself murdered soon after. The thirteenth of the name, father of the great Cleopatra, murdered his daughter Berenice, and several other persons. Into this pleasant family circle Cleopatra was born.
The women .of the. family were even’ more violent than the men. The men ‘were bad enough, including Ptolemy IX, nicknamed : “The Bloated” by the court wits; Ptolemy X, of the great purplish nose;- Ptolemy XI, so bloated by gluttony and vice that he-seldom walked without crutches. The father of Cleopatra, nicknamed Auletes or “The Piper,’ hated temperance so much that:he threatened the philosopher Demetrius with death,. for not being intoxicated at a royal feast; and, to save his life,-the unfortunate philosopher the next day had to. drink himself silly. The Piper was a degenerate little kingling, who lurched across Egypt’s political stage in a condition of almost continuous drunkenness. His predecessor had willed Egypt to the Roman : Republic; The Piper spent much of his life and his fortune bribing the great Roman politicians to let him continue to play at kinging Egypt. While away on this mission at Rome, his daughter Berenice seized the throne, and ruled as Berenice IV. This was in 58 B. C.; the young Cleopatra was now eleven years old
Publisher: Often Haldeman‑Julius or similar presses in the 1920s–30s.