The XX Factor: What women really think.

Letters to Cleo

Nina, I hadn't heard that archaeologists may be on the verge of discovering Cleopatra's tomb until I read your post this morning. By coincidence, last night I was reading a chapter about Cleopatra in Christina Nehring's forthcoming book A Vindication of Love: Reclaiming Romance for the Twenty-First Century. Nehring's contrarian argument complements Schiff's essay nicely. She argues that in domesticating love into egalitarian marriages, by emphasizing equality and intimacy rather than power-differentials and erotic distance, we've lost that special sizzle. Shakespeare's Cleopatra and Antony constitute one of her prime examples of a love match that really works, a love match filled with games and drama:

Convinced that docility in the life of the affections is the road to dreariness, Cleopatra offers Antony a smorgasbord of strategic contradictions. When Antony wishes to ignore a messenger, she orders him to pay attention; when he wishes to lounge in her arms, she reports herself missing; when he desires to go to sea-battle against his enemy Octavius Caesar, she accompanies him, only to flee at the worst moment possible, prompting him to withdraw his ships after her own, and humiliating him before the military world.

As he acknowledges to her after, "My heart was to thy rudder tied by th' strings,/ and thou should'st tow me after. O'er my spirit/Thy full supremacy thou knew'st."

It's The Rules, the Nile Edition. Except that somehow in Cleopatra's case, the game-playing does seem like a form of strength rather than passivity scripted to look like authority. As you point out, Nina, we see Cleopatra as powerful, sexual, and forward. I can't think of all that many contemporary cultural figures who share her traits. I'm curious: Do you, like Nehring, think that her capriciousness is a crucial part of her appeal?