Enchantress and Martyr

Antiquity slowly became the Middle Ages but late-antique historical accounts, whether pagan or Christian, maintained a similar attitude towards Antony and Cleopatra. Two of them in particular, Orosius’ Historiae adversus paganos – commissioned by St. Augustine, as a corollary or appendix to his De civitate Dei (AD 413-426) – and the anonymous De viris illustribus (first to fourth century), whose author was probably a pagan – definitively solidified and took to extremes the negative portraits of the two lovers. In Orosius’ compendium, Antony is systematically denied any military prowess and his greed for money and power is emphasised. In De viris illustribus, Cleopatra turns into the dark heroine of an Oriental tale, ‘Haec tantae libidinis fuit, ut saepe prostiterit, tantae pulchritudinis, ut multi noctem illius morte emerint’ [‘She was so lustful that she would often sell herself, so beautiful that many men bought a night with her at the cost of their own death’] (86.2).

Not many years later, Latinius Pacatus Drepanius, in his panegyric to the Emperor Theodosius (AD 389), retold the epic confrontation between East and West, now more than ever conceived of as a struggle between moral corruption and liberty and duty. He believed it all to be true, but his account nevertheless has the flavour a literary tale (XXXIII.1-2). The great and famous Alexandrine war, distorted by exaggerations and mystifications, was inevitably bound to appear increasingly unreal, in later centuries. Strange as it seems, while her life was still condemned by historians, Cleopatra's voluntary death was praised by at least one Christian Latin writer. In his treatise Ad nationes, Tertullian associated her with the cult of martyrs (1.18.3).