to her both in youth and beauty. From the available accounts, even if Cleopatra’s nose had been shorter, she would have been no less irresistible, since the change would have been more in harmony with her pert spirit.[1] Pascal’s famous question is thus answered in respect to her influence on men. But suppose she had been a fright, would world history have been very different? It is hardly likely.
Cleopatra was not a great courtesan but a shrewd politician, with overreaching ambitions, who fought a losing battle to preserve the independence of her empire. The preservation of her empire was the fixed principle of her policy, to which she showed a far greater constancy than to any of her royal lovers. She was willing to learn to love anybody who would save her dynasty. She threw Antony over and tricked him into suicide after the Battle of Actium and would have added Octavian to her collection if his temperament had not been so cold. Ferrero and other historians suggest that she inspired Julius Cæsar to dream of a World Empire with her beside him as Queen of the Earth, but it is unlikely that Cæsar’s ambition ever waited upon anything but opportunity. Cleopatra was Cæsar’s personal weakness, not his political mentor: Cæsar was Cleopatra’s political patron, hardly her romantic ideal. At any rate, the men who killed Cæsar and who were very well acquainted with his affairs and the influences to which he was subjected made no attempt to molest Cleopatra, who was living with Cæsar in Rome at the time of his death. Had she inspired him with the ambition to become Emperor of the Roman world, it is extremely unlikely that they would have taken no action against her.
As in the case of Cleopatra, most of what we know about the Empress Theodora is derived from sources that are hostile or unsympathetic. Even after discounting the malice of religious fanatics whose orthodoxy she outraged, there is no reason to doubt the main facts of her early life. She was born to a family of circus performers, and she herself became a professional dancer and actress. In Byzantium this was the badge of another profession as well. Before she reached the age of twenty she had become the most notorious figure both on and off the stage in
- ↑ “For her actual beauty was not in itself so remarkable that none could be compared with her, or that no one could see her without being struck by it, but the contact of her presence, if you lived with her, was irresistible: The attraction of her person, joining with the charm of her conversation, and the character that attended all she said or did, was something bewitching.”—Plutarch.
